Note 942 — Chapter VI · SCIENCE AND COMMUNAL POETRY

See pp. 60 f. This artistic power is his definition of the poetic process. Professor Giddings, on hints of Mr. Spencer, has drawn a picture of solitary, primitive man arguing a spirit from the phenomenon of his shadow and of the echo of his voice. It may be pointed out that communal shouts and cries, echoed from the rocks, would be more likely to rouse a belief in that horde of spirits with which the primitive human horde thought itself surrounded. Early religion was social, communal; individual meditation, a process of individual thought, was utterly subordinate to communal thought. Even now superstition is a lingering “they say.”