THOUGHTS ON NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 7Q 



of mind. The more powerful spirits or ghosts sup- 

 posed to dwell in various external things, have become 

 in the Vedas objects of greater fear than the rest; they 

 are endowed with higher attributes, are surrounded 

 by deeper mystery, and have been promoted to be 

 kings, as it were, among the gods. These were chiefly 

 the spirits supposed to animate, or to cause, the sky 

 and the heavenly bodies ; and the promotion of these 

 spirits had so dimmed the comparative glory of the 

 rest, that the Animism becomes in the Vedas what we 

 call Polytheism. The newer stage of belief was not 

 a contradiction of the older ; it was simply a further 

 advance along the same lines, and resting on the 

 same foundations. The lesser spirits, or at least 

 most of them, survived as naiads and dryads, spirits 

 of the streams and trees, demons, goblins, ogres, 

 spirit-messengers, and fairies, good or bad. And the 

 old belief in mysteriously animated objects survived, 

 too, in the belief in magic, in sorcery, and in charms 

 of various kinds. 



The Vedas are the source of two vast currents 

 through the ocean of religious thought, one of which 

 flows by way of the Rig Vedas, Upanishads, etc., 

 through Brahmanism (a system of religious institu- 

 tions, originated and elaborated by the Brahmans) to 

 Buddhism ; and the other by way of the *Zend Avesta 

 through the Accadian, Semitic, and Hebrew religions 

 to Christianity. 



* The religious ideas indicated in the Vedas and Zend Avesta com- 

 bined with a more Primitive Animism and Shamanism, etc., were more 

 or less the ideas of the peoples dwelling in the mountains of Media and 

 the valleys watered by the Tigris and Euphrates. 



