796. It is a matter of course that the being tries to clothe his innate, primal sensation of the nature of his own "self" with products from his purely outer faculty of imagination. All more advanced beings in the animal kingdom as well as the human kingdom try to give an outward expression to what fills their consciousness or soul, which is also expressed in the old saying: "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh". When birds sing, animals roar and human beings speak, it is in order to express only some particular part of their sense of the experience of life. When primitive human beings as well as civilised human beings "believe" in a "god" or "gods", it is only because their "hearts", which in this case means their consciousness or sphere of thoughts, are filled with instinctive ideas or inklings that there exists an "I" behind Nature or all the outer phenomena that surround them, just as there does in their own imperceptible inner being. This entire world of imagination about "gods" and "spirits" as well as the being's concept of its "I" is therefore rooted exclusively in the being's inner being, which is inaccessible to the senses and therefore unknown. Just as the being has gradually had to create expressions to describe its centre, which, although imperceptible, nevertheless directs and exercises will, so too has it of course gradually had to find expressions to describe the presence of similar will-exercising centres in its fellow beings and the rest of Nature, or behind everything that proves itself to reveal logical and thereby will-exercising creation, vibration or movement. That these expressions, at the beginning of the history of the beings' evolution, are very primitive, meaning that they constitute ideas based merely on pure feeling, ideas that are not based on any in-depth, intelligent analysis – and this applies just as much to the I – are a matter of course, since the development of the faculty of intelligence to the level that would enable the beings to bring its experiences and ideas into a hundred per cent contact with reality, and thereby experience them as scientific facts, would enter the being's consciousness only at a much later stage than the faculty of feeling. It therefore becomes clear, as a totally natural and inevitable consequence, that until that time the being will be able to express its sense of life experience only in terms of feelings, which are in turn to a certain extent the same as what we call superstition or imagination.