314 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL VI. 
Fear has been by many philosophers and psychologists looked upon 
as the originator of religion and the sense of the sublime and wonderful. 
One recent writer observes : 
“ This awe of nature, even when not a kind of worship, is the child of 
our inheritances. Our ancestral savage could conceive of no other 
medium of communication from his God to himself than the material 
world in which he found himself. The power and force, the ruthlessness 
and inexorableness of the laws as he knew them, bodied forth with a 
flawless exactitude his ideas of what a God should be, based on the only 
two human qualities which he was able to understand—determination 
and physical force. And to this day these are the only attributes of 
a God which nature has to offer us through any of her phenomena. 
Viewed and studied either in the mass or in detail, we can learn from 
her workings nothing else than these. We look in vain for even the 
slightest indication of a single one of those human qualities which we 
have been accustomed to regard as akin to the Divine.” (Amer. Anthr., 
Vol. V., p. 248.) 
This, I venture to say, whatever modicum of truth the modern philos- 
opher can see in such a doctrine, is decidedly false and unjust asa 
general characterization of the attitude of those ancestors of ours who 
felt their kinship with “mother earth” and “father sky,’ worshipped 
the light, and with poetic imagination turned night into the fertile womb 
of being. _Something else there is in man, as old at least as fear. 
One of the most eminent men of science, again, does violence, unwit- 
tingly, no doubt, to the heart and the soul of primitive man, when he 
declares in exaggerated language : 
“ Nature tells the savage that the earth is flat, over which the sky is 
arched as a solid dome; then Nature tells the savage-that the sun 
travels over the flat earth and under the sky of ice by day from east to 
west ; then Nature tells the savage that the rain comes from the melting 
of the ice of the sky. Many, strange, foolish and false are the stories 
that Nature tells to the untutored savage. Nature is the Gulliver of 
Gullivers, the Munchausen of Munchausens. Nature teaches men to 
believe in wizards and ghosts ; Nature fills the human mind with foolish 
superstitions and horrible beliefs. The opinions of natural man fill him 
with many fears, give him many pains, and cause him to commit many 
crimes. © . To the savage man Nature “is ever. a deceiversand aa 
cheat.” (Major Powell, in Ammer. Anthr., Vol. I., p. 312.) 
Not so. Nature, from the beginning, has been a tireless teacher of 
