{"collection":"egy","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/egy/rtae/rtae02.htm","path":"egy/rtae/rtae02.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/egy/rtae/rtae02.htm","text":"Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt, by James Henry Breasted, [1912]\nNature furnishes the earliest gods\u2014The national state makes early impression on religion\u2014Its forms pass over into the world of the gods\u2014Their origin and function in nature retire into the background\u2014The gods become active in the sphere of human affairs\u2014They are intellectualized and spiritualized till the human arena becomes their domain\u2014The gods are correlated into a general system\u2014In the conception of death and the hereafter we find a glorious celestial realm reserved exclusively for kings and possibly nobles\u2014Herein, too, we discern the emergence of the moral sense and the inner life in their influence on religion\u2014Recognition of futility of material agencies in the hereafter and resulting scepticism\u2014Appearance of the capacity to contemplate society\u2014Recognition of the moral unworthiness of society and resulting scepticism\u2014The cry for social justice\u2014The social forces make their impression on religion\u2014Resulting democratization of the formerly royal hereafter\u2014Magic invades the realm of morals\u2014The Empire (the international state) and political universalism so impress religion that the \"world-idea\" emerges and monotheism results\u2014Earliest manifestation of personal piety growing out of paternal monotheism and the older social justice\u2014The individual in religion\u2014The age of the psalmist and the sage\u2014Sacerdotalism triumphs, resulting in intellectual stagnation, the inertia of thoughtless acceptance, and the development\nceases in scribal conservation of the old teachings\u2014The retrospective age\u2014A religious development of three thousand years analogous in the main points to that of the Hebrews.","title":"Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt: Epi...","type":"page"}