ii.l FEAR, THE CAUSE OF SUPERSTITION. 209 



spiritual something's make spiritual raps upon spiritual 

 wood ; and human beings, who are really spirits and 

 would to heaven they would remember that fact, and 

 what it means believe that anything has happened 

 beyond a clumsy juggler's trick. 



You demur ? Do you not see that the demon, by the 

 mere fact of having produced physical consequences, 

 would have become himself a physical agent, a member 

 of physical Nature, and therefore to be explained, he 

 and his doings, by physical laws ? If you do not see 

 that conclusion at first sight, think over it till you do. 



It may seem to some that I have founded my theory 

 on a very narrow basis ; that I am building up an 

 inverted pyramid; or that, considering the number- 

 less, complex, fantastic shapes which superstition has 

 assumed, bodily fear is too simple to explain them all. 



But if those persons will think a second time, they 

 must agree that my base is as broad as the phenomena 

 which it explains ; for every man is capable of fear. 

 And they will see, too, that the cause of superstition 

 must be something like fear, which is common to all 

 men : for all, at least as children, are capable of super- 

 stition ; and that it must be something which, like fear, 

 is of a most simple, rudimentary, barbaric kind; for 

 the lowest savage, of whatever he is not capable, is still 

 superstitious, often to a very ugly degree. Superstition 

 seems, indeed, to be, next to the making of stone- 

 weapons, the earliest method of asserting his supe- 

 riority to the brutes which has occurred to that utterly 

 abnormal and fantastic lusus naturce called man. 



Now let us put ourselves awhile, as far as we can, 

 in the place of that same savage ; and try whether my 

 theory will not justify itself ; whether or not super- 



