458 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



personalized by " a disease of language." Personalization exists at the 

 outset ; and the worship is in all cases the worship of an indwelling 

 ghost-derived being. 



That these conclusions are necessitated by an exhaustive examina- 

 tion of the evidence, is shown by the fact that they have been forced 

 on Dr. E. B. Tylor notwithstanding his original enunciation of other 

 conclusions. In a lecture " On Traces of the Early Mental Condition 

 of Man," delivered at the Royal Institution on the 15th of March, 

 1867, he said :— 



It is well known that the lower races of mankind acconnt for the facts and 

 events of the outer world by ascribing a sort of human life and personality to 

 animals, and even to plants, rocks, streams, winds, the sun and stars, and so on 

 through the phenomena of nature. ... It would probably add to the clearness 

 of our conception of the state of mind which thus sees in all nature the action 

 of animated life and the presence of innumerable spiritual beings, if we gave it 

 the name of Animism instead of Fetichism. 



Here, having first noted that the conception of Fetichism derived by 

 Dr. Tylor from multitudinous facts, is not like that of Mr. Harrison, 

 who conceives Fetichism to be a worship of the objects themselves, 

 and not a worship of their indwelling spirits, we further note that Dr. 

 Tylor regards this ascription of souls to all objects, inanimate as well 

 as animate, which he proposes to call Animism rather than Fetichism, 

 as being primordial. In the earlier part of his " Primitive Culture," 

 published in 1871, we find a re-statement of this view ; but further 

 on we observe a modification of it, as instance the following sentence 

 in vol. ii, p. 100. 



It seems as though the conception of a human soul, when once attained to by 

 man, served as a type or model on which he framed not only his ideas of other 

 souls of lower grade, but also his ideas of spiritual beings in general, from the 

 tiniest elf that sports in the long grass, up to the heavenly Creator and Ruler of 

 the world, the Great Spirit. 



And then, in articles published in " Mind " for April and for July, 

 1877, Dr. Tylor represented himself as holding a doctrine identical 

 with that set forth by me in the " Principles of Sociology " ; namely, 

 that the belief in a human ghost is original, and that the beliefs in 

 spirits inhabiting inanimate objects, giving rise to Fetichism and Na- 

 ture-worship, are derived beliefs. 



An emphatic negative is thus given to Mr. Harrison's assertion 

 that " Nothing is more certain than that man everywhere started with 

 a simple worship of natural objects." And if he holds that " the 

 bearing of this on the future of religion is decisive " — if, as he says, 

 " the religion of man in the vast cycles of primitive ages was rever- 

 ence for nature as influencing Man," and if, as he infers, " the religion 

 of man in the vast cycles that are to come will be the reverence for 

 Humanity as supported by Nature " — if, as it thus seems, primitive 

 religion as conceived by him is a basis for what he conceives to be the 



