IN LOWER MAN. ill 



On the other hand, the deification of woman by man, or 

 what is tantamount thereto, is not uncommonly seen among 

 our most highly cultured classes. The writings of the poets 

 in all times, indeed, have abounded in evidences of this sort 

 of adoration. And even philosophers of the driest type are not 

 exempt from so tender an idolatry. Of this there is perhaps no 

 better modern instance than that of the late John Stuart 

 Mill, who thus speaks of his own wife : ' Her memory is to me 

 a religion, and her approbation the standard by which 

 summing up as it does all worthiness I endeavour to regu- 

 late my life.' ' Thus he may be said to have made a goddess 

 of his wife. And, though not to the same extent, or in quite 

 the same sense, there are hosts of other men of culture or 

 refinement who make divinities of wives, mothers, daughters, 

 sisters, or beloved. This worship of woman by man, however, 

 differs in various respects from that of man by woman, or that 

 of man by fellow- man. In this case also there may be a 

 respect for power or strength, but never for mere bodily 

 power or strength. Frequently, however, the source or cause of 

 reverence, admiration, or adoration is physical beauty, some- 

 times pure and simple, more usually as associated with the 

 moral graces or virtues of love, gentleness, purity and even 

 with that feminine attribute that may or may not be con- 

 sidered a virtue the sense of dependence, the attribute of 

 weakness, already alluded to. 



Nor must we, either in man or woman in civilised peoples 

 of all ages, forget the many forms of worship of the ideal, 

 of imaginary embodiments of the physical, intellectual, and 

 moral virtues. 



It is not either necessary or desirable to describe here the 

 various forms of the worship of natural objects or phenomena by 

 savage races for instance, the fetichism of the West African 

 tribes, or the shamanism of the Tungusians and Yakuts. But 

 it is of interest to note that such a kind of worship is 

 neither confined to Africa nor to savage races ; for, on the 

 one hand, it is to be met with in the Sarnoyedes and Laplanders 

 of Northern Europe, and, on the other, among the in some re- 

 spects highly civilised Chinese. Rae tells us that the Russian 

 1 Autobiography, 1873. 



