CIVILIZATION AND SCIENCE. 259 



beings like himself, though usually hidden to his senses, whom he fan- 

 cied to be free from the limitations to which he himself was subject, 

 but who for the rest had the same emotions of love and hate, gratitude 

 and revenge, with himself. The sum of such imaginings of a given 

 nation at a given time we call its religion ; but it might also be regarded 

 as the personificative or anthropomorphic stage of our system of Nature. 

 This attitude of man toward Nature is very clearly seen in Homer. 



According to David Friedrich Strauss, 1 the bias of man's mind toward 

 the personification of the forces of Nature has its root in the fact that 

 so he hopes to win the favor of those unknown and dreaded powers. 

 Perhaps a profounder reason could be assigned. Man originally knows 

 no other cause of occurrences save his own will, the exercise of which 

 is matter of direct experience, and hence it is that he refers all events 

 back to the action of a will like his own. This explanation appears all 

 the more probable, inasmuch as the same conception, only in a more 

 refined form, still unconsciously pervades our theories of natural science. 

 For undoubtedly this is the origin of the idea of Force which has done 

 so much mischief in science, and which, despite all that we can do, is 

 still ever creeping in. a We even see certain addle-brains in dead ear- 

 nest entertaining the fantastic conceit that, by the aid of such anthro- 

 pomorphic ideas as these, the mutual attractions of bodies across empty 

 space can be explained. What difference is there between that Will 

 which, according to our latest Nature-philosophers, drives the atoms 

 together, and the gods of antiquity who animated the planets ? The 

 serpent of human knowledge has once more bitten its own tail ; human 

 science has reverted to its starting-point. 



Very conclusively, as would appear at first sight, Buckle, in his 

 " History of Civilization," 3 from the aspects of Nature in different 

 regions, deduces the religions there originating. He shows us India 

 bounded on the north by the Himalayas, where Mount Everest towers 

 to a height twice as great as that of Mont Blanc, where the Pass of 

 Kwen-Lun leads into Thibet at an elevation equal to that of Caucasus, 

 and where the Eiger, the MOnch, and the Jungfrau, piled on top of one 

 another, would only fill up one of the lateral valleys. Toward the 

 south he shows us the Indian Peninsula, with its harborless coasts, pro- 

 jecting into a sea that stretches uninterrupted to the pole, and which 

 is often swept by cyclones. From the mountains to the sea streams 

 not to be bridged over flow, passing through interminable jungles, in 

 which wild beasts and venomous serpents threaten the life of the way- 

 farer at every step. According to the official returns, about 11,000 

 persons lose their lives annually in British India from the bites of ser- 

 pents, especially the cobra de capello. 4 Failure of crops, famine, and 



1 " The Old Faith and the New," New York, 1875. 



2 See Du Bois-Reymond's " Untersuchungen iiber thierische Elektricitat," Berlin, 1848, 

 vol. i., p. xlii. 



3 " History of Civilization," New York, 1878, vol. i., chapter ii. 



4 Fayrer's " Thanatophidia of India," London, 1872, p. 32. Most probably, the num- 



