214 SUPEESTITION. [ix. 



by an atmosphere of civilisation and Christianity which 

 they have accepted at second-hand as the conclusions 

 of minds wiser than their own, that they do all manner 

 of reasonable things for bad reasons, or for no reason 

 at all, save the passion of imitation. Not in them, but 

 in the savage, can we see man as he is by nature, the 

 puppet of his senses and his passions, the natural slave 

 of his own fears. 



But has the savage no other faculties, save his five 

 senses and five passions ? I do not say that. I should 

 be most unphilosophical if I said it ; for the history of 

 mankind proves that he has infinitely more in him 

 than that. Yes : but in him that infinite more, which 

 is not only the noblest part of humanity, but, it may 

 be, humanity itself, is not to be counted as one of the 

 roots of superstition. For in the savage man, in whom 

 superstition certainly originates, that infinite more is 

 still merely in him ; inside him; a faculty : but not yet 

 a fact. It has not come out of him into consciousness, 

 purpose, and act ; and is to be treated as non-existent : 

 while what has come out, his passions and senses, is 

 enough to explain all the vagaries of superstition ; a 

 vera causa for all its phenomena. And if we seem to 

 have found a sufficient explanation already, it is un- 

 philosophical to look farther, at least till we have tried 

 whether our explanation fits the facts. 



Nevertheless, there is another faculty in the savage, 

 to which I have already alluded, common to him and 

 to at least the higher vertebrates fancy ; the power 

 of reproducing internal images of external objects, 

 whether in its waking form of physical memory if, 

 indeed, all memory be not physical or in its sleeping 

 form of dreaming. Upon this last, which has played 



