322 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



find them neither the one nor the other. But to show all this would 

 take much trouble to small purpose. Indeed, I must here close the 

 discussion, so far as my own desistence enables me. It is a wearisome 

 and profitless business, this of continually going back on the record, 

 now to show that the ideas ascribed to me are not the ideas I ex- 

 pressed, and now to show that the statements my opponent defends 

 are not the statements he originally made. A controversy always 

 opens side issues. Each new issue becomes the parent of further ones. 

 The original questions become obscured in a swarm of collateral ques- 

 tions ; and energies, in my case ill-spared, are wasted to little purpose. 



Before closing, however, let me again point out that nothing has 

 been said which calls for change of the views expressed in my first 

 article. 



Setting out with the statement that "unlike the ordinary conscious- 

 ness, the religious consciousness is concerned with that which lies be- 

 yond the sphere of sense," I went on to show that the rise of this con- 

 sciousness begins among primitive men with the belief in a double 

 belonging to each individual, which, capable of wandering away from 

 him during life, becomes his ghost or spirit after death ; and that from 

 this idea of a being eventually distinguished as supernatural, there de- 

 velop, in course of time, the ideas of supernatural beings of all orders 

 up to the highest. Mr. Harrison has alleged that the primitive reli- 

 gion is not belief in, and propitiation of, the ghost, but is worship of 

 " physical objects treated frankly as physical objects " (p. 498). That 

 he has disproved the one view and proved the other, no one will, I 

 think, assert. Contrariwise, he has given occasion for me to cite 

 weighty authorities against him. 



Next it was contended that in the assemblage of supernatural be- 

 ings thus originating in each tribe, some, derived from chiefs, were 

 superior to others ; and that, as the compounding and re-compounding 

 of tribes gave origin to societies having social grades and rulers of 

 different orders, there resulted that conception of a hierarchy of ghosts 

 or gods which polytheism shows us. Further it was argued that while, 

 with the growth of civilization and knowledge, the minor supernatural 

 agents became merged in the major supernatural agent, this single 

 great supernatural agent, gradually losing the anthropomorphic attri- 

 butes at first ascribed, has come in our days to retain but few of them ; 

 and, eventually losing these, will then merge into a consciousness of 

 an omnipresent power to which no attributes can be ascribed. This 

 proposition has not been contested. 



In pursuance of the belief that the religious consciousness naturally 

 arising, and thus gradually transformed, would not disappear wholly, 

 but that " however much changed it must continue to exist," it was 

 argued that the sentiments which had grown up around the conception 

 of a personal God, though modified when that conception was modi- 



