his doings, by physical laws? If you do not see that conclusion at first
sight, think over it till you do.

It may seem to some that I have founded my theory on a very narrow basis;
that I am building up an inverted pyramid; or that, considering the
numberless, complex, fantastic shapes which superstition has assumed,
bodily fear is too simple to explain them all.

But if those persons will think a second time, they must agree that my
base is as broad as the phenomena which it explains; for every man is
capable of fear. And they will see, too, that the cause of superstition
must be something like fear, which is common to all men: for all, at
least as children, are capable of superstition; and that it must be
something which, like fear, is of a most simple, rudimentary, barbaric
kind; for the lowest savage, of whatever he is not capable, is still
superstitious, often to a very ugly degree. Superstition seems, indeed,
to be, next to the making of stone-weapons, the earliest method of
asserting his superiority to the brutes which has occurred to that
utterly abnormal and fantastic lusus naturae called man.

Now let us put ourselves awhile, as far as we can, in the place of that
same savage; and try whether my theory will not justify itself; whether
or not superstition, with all its vagaries, may have been, indeed must
have been, the result of that ignorance and fear which he carried about
with him, every time he prowled for food through the primeval forest.

A savage's first division of nature would be, I should say, into things
which he can eat, and things which can eat him; including, of course, his
most formidable enemy, and most savoury food--his fellow-man. In finding
out what he can eat, we must remember, he will have gone through much
experience which will have inspired him with a serious respect for the
hidden wrath of nature; like those Himalayan folk, of whom Hooker says,
that as they know every poisonous plant, they must have tried them
all--not always with impunity.

So he gets at a third class of objects--things which he cannot eat, and
which will not eat him; but will only do him harm, as it seems to him,
out of pure malice, like poisonous plants and serpents. There are
natural accidents, too, which fall into the same category, stones,
floods, fires, avalanches. They hurt him or kill him, surely for ends of
their own. If a rock falls from the cliff above him, what more natural
than to suppose that