AGNOSTIC METAPHYSICS. 309 



Spencer laboriously tries to persuade us that the worship of the Sun 

 and the Moon arose, not from man's natural reverence for these great 

 and beautiful powers of Nature, but solely as they were thought to be 

 the abodes of the disembodied spirits of dead ancestors. Animal wor- 

 ship, tree and plant worship, fetichism, the Confucian worship of 

 heaven, all, he would have us believe, take their origin entirely from 

 the idea that these objects contain the spirits of the dead. If this is 

 not " persistent thinking along defined grooves," I know not what it is. 



The case of China is decisive. There we have a religion of vast 

 antiquity and extent, perfectly clear and well ascertained. It rests 

 entirely on worship of Heaven, and Earth, and objects of Nature, re- 

 garded as organized beings, and not as the abode of human spirits. 

 There is in the religion and philosophy of China no notion of human 

 spirits, disembodied and detached from the dead person, conceived as 

 living in objects and distinct from dead bodies. The dead are the 

 dead ; not the spiritual denizens of othei* things. In the face of this, 

 the vague language of missionaries and travellers as to the beliefs of 

 savages must be treated with caution. Mr. Spencer speaks in too 

 confident language of his having " proved " and " disproved " and 

 " shown " all these things in his " Descriptive Sociology " and in his 

 " Principles of Sociology." How many competent persons has he 

 convinced ? Assuredly, for my part, I read and re-read all that he 

 there says about the genesis of religion with amazement. We read 

 these authorities for ourselves, and we can not see that they bear out 

 his conclusions. It was a pity to refer to the tables in the " Descrip- 

 tive Sociology," perhaps the least successful of all Mr. Spencer's works. 

 That work is a huge file of cuttings from various travellers of all 

 classes, extracted by three gentlemen whom Mr. Spencer employed. 

 Of course these intelligent gentlemen had little difficulty in clipping 

 from hundreds of books about foreign races sentences which seem to 

 support Mr. Spencer's doctrines. The whole proceeding is too much 

 like that of a famous lawyer who wrote a law-book, and then gave it 

 to his pupils to find the " cases " which supported his law. It is a lit- 

 tle suspicious that we find so often at the head of each " susperstition " 

 of the lower races a heading in almost the same words to the effect : 

 " Dreams, regarded as visits from the spirits of departed relations." 

 The intelligent gentlemen employed have done their work very well ; 

 but of course one can find in this medley of tables almost any view. 

 And I find facts which make for my view as often as any other. 



Fetichism, says Mr. Spencer, is not found in the lowest races. Be 

 that as it may, it is found wherever we can trace the germs of religion. 

 Well, I read in the " Descriptive Sociology " that Mr. Burton, perhaps 

 the most capable of all African travellers, declares that " fetichism is 

 still the only faith known in East Africa." In other places, we read 

 of the sun and moon, forests, trees, stones, snakes, and the like re- 

 garded with religious reverence by the savages of Central Africa. 



