jESTHETICISM AND RELIGION IN ANIMALS. 477 



propitiating and fawning upon them, creeping and groveling on 

 the ground in abject adoration, in order to assuage their anger or 

 to secure their kind regard. " There is no difference/' adds the 

 same author, " between the negro who worships a dangerous ani- 

 mal, and the dog who crouches at his master's feet to obtain 

 pardon for a fault. . . . Animals fly to man for protection -as a 

 believer does to his god." 



This is precisely the feeling of the savage in respect to the 

 superior skill and power of the civilized man. Taguta kipini te 

 Atua — doctor all the same as God — are .the words in which the 

 Morioris, or aborigines of the Chatham Islands, expressed their 

 sense of dependence on a higher agency, whose beneficent work- 

 ings they perceived but could not comprehend. Among rude 

 tribes the sentiment of devotion to a chief does not differ essen- 

 tially from that of devotion to a god ; the Romans, at the height 

 of their civilization, paid divine honors to their emperors ; and in 

 modern monarchies kings are officially addressed in terms of rev- 

 erential awe and superlative adulation as all-wise and all-power- 

 ful beings, whose favor one can not sufficiently implore with servile 

 words and suppliant knee. 



" The feeling of religious devotion," says Darwin, " is a highly 

 complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted 

 and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, rever- 

 ence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements. 

 No being could experience so complex an emotion until advanced 

 in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately 

 high level. Nevertheless, we see some distinct approach to this 

 state of mind in the deep love of a dog for his master, associated 

 with complete submission, some fear, and perhaps other feel- 

 ings." * 



Comte held that the higher animals are capable of forming 

 fetichistic conceptions, and of being strongly influenced by them. 

 Herbert Spencer denies the truth of this statement in its absolute 

 form, because it does not fit into his theory of the origin and evo- 

 lution of religious ideas, but admits, what is essentially the same 

 thing so far as the present discussion is concerned, that " the be- 

 havior of intelligent animals elucidates the genesis " of fetichism, 

 and gives two illustrations of it. " One of these actions was that 

 of a formidable beast, half mastiff, half bloodhound, belonging to 

 friends of mine. While playing with a walking-stick, which had 

 been given to him and which lie had seized by the lower end, it 

 happened that in his gambols he thrust the handle against the 

 ground, the result being that the end ho had in his mouth was 

 forced against his palate. Giving a yelp, he dropped the stick, 



* The Descent of Man. London, 1SV4, p. 95. 



