12 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ligions Zoroaster, Moses, Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, and Christ. 

 Moreover, we may notice, as Peschel has pointed out, the suggestive 

 fact that it is in the wide expanses and awe-inspiring solitudes of the 

 desert, where the imagination, while vividly excited, is yet not dis- 

 tracted and divided among the manifold wonders of nature shim- 

 mering leaf and gnarled trunks, writhing mists and rattling thunder, 

 and the weird sounds of forest or sea-beach that suggest and develop 

 the polytheistic gods, but can give itself up entirely to the impressions 

 of a single Majesty and Infinity it is, I say, amid these noble yet 

 simple aspects of nature, that the great monotheistic religions, Judaism, 

 Mohammedanism, and Christianity, have been originated. It was at 

 Sinai that Moses promulgated his stern prohibitions of idolatry and 

 polytheism. It was by a Bedouin foster-mother that Mohammed was 

 reared, and as a shepherd and caravan-merchant, traveling across the 

 Arabian deserts, that he passed his early life. And it was in the 

 desert that Christ listened to the preaching of John the Baptist, and 

 passed the forty days in which he prepared himself for his great career. 

 2. In the second place, we must notice, as of equal if not greater 

 influence in giving diversity to religious faith, man's experiences with 

 himself and with his fellows. It is an old maxim that it is " in the 

 experiences of life that each individual finds or loses his god." Start- 

 ing on the lowest range of the soul's experience, we notice the effect 

 of the dreams, trances, swoons, ecstasies, and other abnormal phe- 

 nomena of human nature, in giving direction and variety to religious 

 conceptions. While I regard it as a grave error to derive religion 

 solely from these morbid phenomena, nevertheless they have undoubt- 

 edly done much in awakening the spiritual powers of man, and in giv- 

 ing shape to his religious instincts. Life, in its most familiar and 

 natural phases, is a mysterious thing a wonder which doubtless filled 

 the primitive man with ill-understood awe, as it has made even the 

 pride of modern science stand abashed before it. And its more eccen- 

 tric and exceptional aspects would especially set men to marveling, 

 and suggest explanations which we may to-day laugh at, but without 

 really having penetrated into the heart of the mystery any more than 

 our remotest ancestors. Thus, among almost all peoples the shadow 

 has been looked upon as a second self, and as one of the causes if not 

 the cause of life. The breath, likewise, with whose cessation life ends, 

 has been especially identified with the soul, the principle of life, as is 

 shown by the same or similar words employed in most languages, as 

 their names atman in Sanskrit ; nephesh and ruach among the He- 

 brews ; icang among the Australians ; anemos and anima in Greek 

 and Latin indicate. As in dreams the savage seems to see his distant 

 kinsmen, to visit remote localities, to behold again the long-dead par- 

 ent or grandparent ; so he comes to believe that the soul, an impal- 

 pable form within the fleshly organism, is capable of leaving the body 

 when it pleases, of taking long journeys and flashing with incredible 



