ore ignorant and savage the
race the more numerous, to judge by the reports, are the cases of
inspiration. Volumes might be filled with examples, but through the
spread of information as to the lower races in recent years the topic
has become so familiar that I need not stop to illustrate it by
instances. I will merely say that among savages the theory of
inspiration or possession is commonly invoked to explain all abnormal
mental states, particularly insanity or conditions of mind bordering on
it, so that persons more or less crazed in their wits, and particularly
hysterical or epileptic patients, are for that very reason thought to be
peculiarly favoured by the spirits and are therefore consulted as
oracles, their wild and whirling words passing for the revelations of a
higher power, whether a god or a ghost, who considerately screens his
too dazzling light under a thick veil of dark sayings and mysterious
ejaculations.[2] I need hardly point out the very serious dangers which
menace any society where such theories are commonly held and acted upon.
If the decisions of a whole community in matters of the gravest
importance are left to turn on the wayward fancies, the whims and
vagaries of the insane or the semi-insane, what are likely to be the
consequences to the commonwealth? What, for example, can be expected to
result from a war entered upon at such dictation and waged under such
auspices? Are cattle-breeding, agriculture, commerce, all the arts of
life on which a people depend for their subsistence, likely to thrive
when they are directed by the ravings of epilepsy or the drivellings of
hysteria? Defeat in battle, conquest by enemies, death by famine and
widespread disease, these and a thousand other lesser evils threaten the
blind people who commit themselves to such blind guides. The history of
savage and barbarous tribes, could we follow it throughout, might
furnish us with a thousand warning instances of the fatal effects of
carrying out this crude theory of inspiration to its logical
conclusions; and if we hear less than might be expected of such
instances, it is probably because the tribes who consistently acted up
to their beliefs have thereby wiped themselves out of existence: they
have perished the victims of their folly and left no record behind. I
believe that historians have not yet reckoned sufficiently with the
disastrous influence which this worship of insanity,--for it is often
nothing less--has exe