"Out of the emotions that surround Women for men and Men for women, out of the desire to escape infection and uncleanness, out of the desire for power and success through magic, out of the sacrificial tradition of seedtime, and out of a number of like beliefs and mental experiments and misconceptions, a complex something was growing up in the lives of men which was beginning to bind them together mentally and emotionally in a common life and action. This something we may call religion (Lat. religare, to bind). It was not a simple, or logical something, it was as a tangle of ideas about commanding beings and spirits, about gods, about all sorts of "musts" and "must-nots". Like all other human matters, religion has grown. It must be clear from what has gone before that primitive man — much less his ancestral apes and his ancestral Mesozoic mammals — could have had no idea of God or Religion; only very slowly did his brain and his powers of comprehension become capable of such general conceptions. Religion is something that has grown up with and through human association, and God has been and is still being discovered by man."
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The Outline of History
The Outline of History : Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (1920) is a work by H. G. Wells in which he summarized much which was known or believed in his time about the courses of the world's history. (Chapter titles from which quotes are taken are given separate sections, but not all chapters are quoted.)
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