ng inhabited by the spirits of departed men. With all respect for
the splendid exposition given by Mr. Spencer[2] of the early beliefs
of mankind regarding spirits, it is impossible to think that he has
made out his case when he treats the gods of early India and of
Greece as deified ancestors. If the natural incredulity we feel at
being told that Jupiter, Indra, the sun, the sacred mountain, and the
stars all alike came to be worshipped because each of them
represented some departed human hero, is not at once decisive, we
have only to wait a little to see whether some other theory cannot
account for these gods in a simpler way.

[Footnote 2: _Sociology_, vol. i. Also _Ecclesiastical Institutions_,
p. 675; "ghost-propitiation is the origin of all religions."]

Mr. Tylor also derives all religion from the worship of spirits, but
in a different way. His is the most comprehensive system of Animism,
using that term in the narrower sense of soul-worship. Starting from
the doctrine of souls, reached by early man in the way described
above (p. 33, _sqq._), he argues that when once this notion was
reached it would be applied to other beings as well as man. Not
having learned to distinguish himself clearly from other beings, man
would judge that they had souls like his own; and so every part of
nature came to have its soul, and everything that went on in the
universe was to be explained as the activity of souls. It was in this
way, according to Mr. Tylor, that the view of the universal animation
of nature, characteristic of early thought, was reached. "As the
human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting
spirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be carried on
by other spirits." At this point the soul is an unsubstantial essence
inhabiting a body, it has its life and activity only in connection
with the body; but the step was easily taken to the further belief in
spirits like the souls, but not attached to any body. The spirits
moved about freely, like the genii, demons, fairies, and beings of
all kinds, with whom to the mind of antiquity the world was so
crowded.

Three classes of spirits we have up to this point: those of
ancestors, those attached to the various parts of the life of nature,
and those existing independently. Can the higher nature-deities be
accounted for by this theory as well as the minor spirits of the
parts of nature? Mr. Tylor considers that they can; he declares that
th