170 Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. [ix. 



dead or inert ; all things were endowed with life and 

 activity. From this came sacrifices, shrines and tem- 

 ples, oracles, and sacerdotal orders. It would be 

 difficult to find any traces of scepticism in all this. 

 Belief then reigned alone in the human mind, and 

 doubt found no place there. As long as the pheno- 

 menal was as yet harder to comprehend and more 

 difficult to control than the unseen and unexplored 

 world that lay beyond it, scepticism was impossible. 

 Not only was it impossible, but it would have been 

 harmful. For the primitive man was barbarous, trea- 

 cherous, revengeful.^ His selfish instincts were as yet 

 all in all. His sympathetic and social feelings were 

 as yet undeveloped. In such a rude condition it was 

 only the bond of a firmly-rooted and wide-spread 

 belief — it was only the ascendency of a priestly and 

 governmental order, thus secured — which could keep 

 society from being disorganised. Had scepticism 

 been once let in, religious and political organisation 

 would have been weakened, sects and parties would 

 have sprung up prematurely, and the strong check 

 needful to curb the undisciplined passions of men 

 would have been destroyed, civilisation would have 

 stopped, and society could no longer have existed. It 

 was only after centuries of theocratic and monarchic 



^ Spencer's Social Statics, pp. 409 — 413. 



