Mark, I'm not sure where you see religion there. Recall a quote from W. H. Hudson's "Idle Days in Patagonia", Ch. 8: "the mind's projection of itself into nature, its attribution of its own sentient life and intelligence to all things--that primitive universal faculty on which the animistic philosophy of the savage is founded. When our philosophers tell us that this faculty is obsolete in us, that it is effectually killed by ratiocination, or that it only survives for a period in our children, I believe they are wrong, a fact which they could find out for themselves if, leaving their books and theories, they would take a solitary walk on a moonlit night..."