3o8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In religion, at any rate, that which can only be described by negations 

 is negative ; that which can not be presented in terms of consciousness 

 is unconscious. 



I shall say but little about Mr, Spencer's Ghost theory as the his- 

 torical source of all religion ; because it is, after all, a subordinate 

 matter, and would lead to a wide digression. I ana sorry that he will 

 not accept my (not very serious) invitation to him to modify the para- 

 doxes thereon to be read in his " Principles of Sociology." I have 

 always held it to be one of the most unlucky of all his sociologic doc- 

 trines, and that on psychological as well as on historical grounds. Mr. 

 Spencer asserts that all forms of religious sentiment spring from the 

 primitive idea of a disembodied double of a dead man. I assert that 

 this is a rather complicated and developed form of thought ; and that 

 the simplest and earliest form of religious sentiment is the idea of the 

 rudest savage, that visible objects around him — animal, vegetable, and 

 inorganic — have quasi-human feelings and powers, which he regards 

 with gratitude and awe. Mr. Spencer says that man only began to 

 worship a river or a volcano when he began to imagine them as the 

 abode of dead men's spirits. I say that he began to fear or adore 

 them, so soon as he thought the river or the volcano had the feelings 

 and the powers of living beings ; and that was from the dawn of the 

 human intelligence. The latter view is, I maintain, far the simpler 

 and more obvious explanation ; and it is a fault in logic to construct a 

 complicated explanation when a simple one answers the facts. Animals 

 think inert things of a peculiar form to be animal ; so do infants. The 

 dog barks at a shadow ; the horse dreads a steam-engine ; the baby 

 loves her doll, feeds her, nurses her, and buries her. The savage thinks 

 the river, or the mountain beside which he lives, the most beneficent, 

 awful, powerful of beings. There is the geim of religion. To assure 

 us that the savage has no feeling of awe and affection for the river and 

 the mountain, until he has evolved the elaborate idea of disembodied 

 spirits of dead men dwelling invisibly inside them, is as idle as it would 

 be to assure us that the love and the terror of the dog, the horse, and 

 the baby are due to their perceiving some disembodied si3irit inside 

 the shadow, the steam-engine, or the doll. 



I think it a little hard that I may not hold this common-sense view 

 of the matter, along with almost all who have studied the question, 

 without being told that it comes of " persistent thinking along defined 

 grooves," and that I should accept the Ghost theory of Religion were 

 it not for my fanatical discipleship. Does not Mr. Spencer himself 

 persistently think along defined grooves ; and does not every system- 

 atic thinker do the same ? But it so happens that the Ghost theory 

 leads to conclusions that outrage common sense. If Dr. Tylor has 

 finally adopted it, I am sorry. But it is certain that the believers in 

 the Ghost theory as the origin of all forms of Religion are few and 

 far between. The difficulties in the way of it are enormous. Mr. 



