77 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



was primordial, and that politics and religion (or, to use his exact ex- 

 pression, political and religious control) were developed out of it by di- 

 vergent evolution. His proof is the similarity of the modes in which 

 reverence is shown to gods and to political rulers, and which, he says, 

 denotes the kinship of the two sets of observances and their community 

 of origin. In tracing this similarity he allows his fancy a pretty free 

 range, as, for example, when he identifies the visit of a worshiper to 

 a temple with a morning call paid to a great man, and the payments 

 made for the support of a Christian clergy with sacrifices to a heathen 

 deity. But it does not occur to him that man, being provided with 

 only one set of organs of expression, is obliged to use them in the case 

 of a ruler as well as in that of a god, and may do so without at all 

 confounding in his mind the different characters and claims of the two. 

 The abject adulation which deified the Roman emperors is a proof of 

 this, not a contradiction ; for the adulators were perfectly aware that 

 they were giving to a man that which properly belonged to a god, and 

 in the profanation lay the very point of the sycophancy. So with re- 

 gard to the names of God, which Mr. Spencer thinks we shall be much 

 startled by finding to have been originally descriptive words, and to 

 have expressed superiority. Man has no celestial vocabulary. How- 

 ever distinct his conception of God might be from his conception of 

 anything else, he would have to use the same words to express his 

 reverence in this case as in that of a father or a chieftain. We do not 

 see that the question as to the origin of religion is in any way affected 

 by this discovery. Men speak now of the majesty of the king and 

 the majesty of God ; of the honor due to one as well as of the honor 

 due to the other, without any confusion of ideas as to the respective 

 natures and claims of the two beings. The most startling thing surely 

 would have been to find a name for the Deity, unconnected with any- 

 thing else in human thought or speech, a linguistic aerolite, as it were, 

 dropped from the sky. 



Mr. Spencer's view of the origin of religion is perhaps not unaf- 

 fected by his extreme notion as to the importance and influence of 

 militarism, of which he sees everywhere the malign traces. According 

 to him, the Home Office, when it crops the head of a convict (and 

 washes him), is unwittingly perpetuating the custom of taking trophies 

 by cutting off the hair. When you give a man a lower seat at table, 

 or in an assembly, the survivalist sees in the act a desire to have the 

 force of gravity on your side in the conflict for which everybody is 

 mentally preparing. There is something rather laughable in the idea 

 that the high table on a dais in a college hall is a military vantage- 

 ground from which the " don " may be able to make an onslaught on 

 the under-graduates with the force of gravity on his side. Between 

 sun-myths and survivals there will soon be no room left for any natu- 

 ral belief or action. 



The twist, as many readers will deem it, extends to every subject 



