Evolution of Theology. 239 



Mr. Spencer enforces his argument with a great wealth 

 of illustration. The objection has been made, however, that 

 notwithstanding the conceded universal prevalence of ances- 

 tor-worship, the reasoning, and the facts which are brought 

 to its support, are mainly negative, so far as they are pre- 

 sented in opposition to the theory of animism. The further 

 objection has been made that ancestor-worship implies a 

 degree of fixity in tribal and family relationships which 

 must be wanting in the case of the earliest races, when 

 hardly yet differentiated from the animal kingdom. That 

 savages of a low type, merely creatures of instinct and 

 emotion, of unregulated imagination, who start at their own 

 shadows, believing them to be, in fact, their mysterious 

 other-selves, should directly ascribe the possession of powers 

 and faculties like their own to objects in motion, seems 

 possible, and Mr. Spencer himself appears to allow it when 

 he says, " If we set out with the truth that the laws of 

 Mind are the same throughout the animal kingdom, we 

 shall see that from the behavior of animals in presence of 

 unfamiliar phenomena we may obtain some clue to the inter- 

 pretation which primitive man makes of such phenomena. 

 A brute even of great power and courage betrays alarm in 

 presence of a moving object the like of which it has never 

 seen before. Dread of the unknown appears to be a univer- 

 sal emotion even when the unknown is not at all porten- 

 tous in character." * 



The incoherent and disconnected theologies, if we may so 

 term them, of early races, represent therefore, exactly the 

 loose and disconnected mental ideas which alone they are 

 capable of forming, owing to their deficiency in the general- 

 izing faculty. We may expect that progress in theistic 

 conceptions will, consequently, be apparent in those direc- 

 tions in which this faculty is first exercised ; and the facts 

 correspond to this expectation. Clearly, it will earliest 

 become manifest in connection with natural phenomena 

 which are of daily and familiar observation. "While it is 

 historically true that these ideas of ghosts, demons, sorcerers 

 and ancestral spirits persist, and have wide influence even 

 into periods of well developed civilization, yet there will 

 gradually emerge, in communities where circumstances are 

 favorable to mental development, broader theistic ideas, 

 arising from a widening classification of natural powers and 



* Principles of Sociology. 



