CHAPTER VI. 



EELIGIOUS FEELING IN OTHER ANIMALS. 



IN order to a determination of the question whether it 

 can be said in any proper sense that the lower animals 

 possess religious feeling, it is desirable that we should start 

 with some intelligible definition of what religion is in man. 

 Remembering that the Christian religion is a very limited 

 one compared, for instance, with Buddhism ; that the reli- 

 gions of different peoples are obviously very different in 

 their nature ; and that in certain races, where it exists at all, 

 religion is developed in very rudimentary forms the standard 

 definition which we should adopt, if one be attainable, is 

 one that will apply to what has been so variously described 

 as religiousness or the religious instinct, sentiment, faculty, 

 emotion or impulse, sense or feeling, notions or ideas, in all 

 ranks of man, in all ages, in all stages of development or 

 civilisation, and in all conditions of health and disease. We 

 must, therefore, at once obviously eliminate all that relates 

 distinctively to the Bible and the God of the Bible in other 

 words, all the peculiar beliefs of the Christian, the defini- 

 tions that would exclude all religions but his own, and all 

 the substitutes for religion where no true religion exists. 

 Several classes of definitions may with propriety be made use 

 of viz. (1) dictionary definitions, which represent or reflect 

 current popular conceptions ; (2) the definitions laid down 

 by those anthropologists, or other authorities, who have taken 

 a wide survey, and made a philosophical study, of the reli- 

 gions of the world, and especially of the germs or dawn of 

 religion among the lower races of man; or (3) those of 

 modern theologians, many of whom are beginning to see that 



