ish the true gods from the other supernatural beings with which
early man's world is peopled.[1052] As far as concerns power, the ghosts
and the spirits appear to do all that the gods are credited with doing;
the sphere of ghostly action is practically unlimited, and the spirit
that dwells in a spring, in a river, or in a mountain, is as mighty in
his sphere as Indra or Apollo in his sphere; the difference between them
and gods is a difference of intellectual and moral culture and of the
degree of naturalization in a human society--a god might be defined as a
superhuman Being fashioned by the thought of a civilized people (the
term 'civilized' admitting, however, of many gradations). Still, gods
proper may be distinguished from other Powers by certain characteristics
of person and function. Ghosts are shadowy doubles of human beings,
sometimes nameless, wandering about without definite purpose except to
procure food for themselves, uncertain of temper, friendly or unfriendly
according to caprice or other circumstances, able to help or to harm,
and requiring men to be constantly on the alert so as not in an
unguarded moment to offend them. Souls of recently deceased ancestors,
more highly organized ghosts, conceived of also as attenuated bodies,
have powers not essentially different from those of the simpler ghosts,
but are differentiated from these in function by their intimate
relations with the family or clan to which they belong, and by their
more definite human nature; they are as a rule permanently friendly, are
capable of definite sympathetic social intercourse with living men, and
are sometimes controllers and patrons, hardly to be distinguished from
local or departmental gods. Spirits are ethereal beings residing in, or
closely connected with, certain objects (trees, rivers, springs, stones,
mountains, etc.), sometimes permanently attached to these objects,
sometimes detached; roaming about, sometimes kindly, more generally
inimical, authors of disease and death, to be feared and to be guarded
against, but sometimes in function (though not in origin) identical with
ancestral ghosts. Totems, in their developed form, are revered, but
rarely if ever worshiped. The term 'animal-gods' may mean either living
animals regarded as divine, or animals believed to be the forms assumed
by gods; in the latter case they may be taken to be real gods of an
inferior type.

In distinction from the four classes of Powers just mentio