p at the boulder on the far-off fells.
He is puzzled by it. He fears it. At last he makes up his mind. It is
alive. As the shadows move over it, he sees it move. May it not sleep
there all day, and prowl for prey all night? He had been always afraid
of going up those fells; now he will never go. There is a monster there.

Childish enough, no doubt. But remember that the savage is always a
child. So, indeed, are millions, as well clothed, housed, and policed as
ourselves--children from the cradle to the grave. But of them I do not
talk; because, happily for the world, their childishness is so overlaid
by the result of other men's manhood; by an atmosphere of civilisation
and Christianity which they have accepted at second-hand as the
conclusions of minds wiser than their own, that they do all manner of
reasonable things for bad reasons, or for no reason at all, save the
passion of imitation. Not in them, but in the savage, can we see man as
he is by nature, the puppet of his senses and his passions, the natural
slave of his own fears.

But has the savage no other faculties, save his five senses and five
passions? I do not say that. I should be most unphilosophical if I said
it; for the history of mankind proves that he has infinitely more in him
than that. Yes: but in him that infinite more, which is not only the
noblest part of humanity; but, it may be, humanity itself, is not to be
counted as one of the roots of superstition. For in the savage man, in
whom superstition certainly originates, that infinite more is still
merely in him; inside him; a faculty: but not yet a fact. It has not
come out of him into consciousness, purpose, and act; and is to be
treated as non-existent: while what has come out, his passions and
senses, is enough to explain all the vagaries of superstition; a vera
causa for all its phenomena. And if we seem to have found a sufficient
explanation already, it is unphilosophical to look further, at least till
we have tried whether our explanation fits the facts.

Nevertheless, there is another faculty in the savage, to which I have
already alluded, common to him and to at least the higher
vertebrates--fancy; the power of reproducing internal images of external
objects, whether in its waking form of physical memory--if, indeed, all
memory be not physical--or in its sleeping form of dreaming. Upon this
last, which has played so very important a part in superstition in all
ages, I be