he dreads desperately,
he will act desperately. When he dreads beyond all reason, he will
behave beyond all reason. He has no law of guidance left, save the
lowest selfishness. No law of guidance: and yet his intellect,
left unguided, may be rapid and acute enough to lead him into
terrible follies. Infinitely more imaginative than the lowest
animals, he is for that very reason capable of being infinitely more
foolish, more cowardly, more superstitious. He can--what the lower
animals, happily for them, cannot--organise his folly; erect his
superstitions into a science; and create a whole mythology out of
his blind fear of the unknown. And when he has done that--Woe to
the weak! For when he has reduced his superstition to a science,
then he will reduce his cruelty to a science likewise, and write
books like the "Malleus Maleficarum," and the rest of the witch
literature of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries;
of which Mr. Lecky has of late told the world so much, and told it
most faithfully and most fairly.

But, fear of the unknown? Is not that fear of the unseen world?
And is not that fear of the spiritual world? Pardon me: a great
deal of that fear--all of it, indeed, which is superstition--is
simply not fear of the spiritual, but of the material; and of
nothing else.

The spiritual world--I beg you to fix this in your minds--is not
merely an invisible world which may become visible, but an invisible
world which is by its essence invisible; a moral world, a world of
right and wrong. And spiritual fear--which is one of the noblest of
all affections, as bodily fear is one of the basest--is, if properly
defined, nothing less or more than the fear of doing wrong; of
becoming a worse man.

But what has that to do with mere fear of the unseen? The fancy
which conceives the fear is physical, not spiritual. Think for
yourselves. What difference is there between a savage's fear of a
demon, and a hunter's fear of a fall? The hunter sees a fence. He
does not know what is on the other side, but he has seen fences like
it with a great ditch on the other side, and suspects one here
likewise. He has seen horses fall at such, and men hurt thereby.
He pictures to himself his horse falling at that fence, himself
rolling in the ditch, with possibly a broken limb; and he recoils
from the picture he himself has made; and perhaps with very good
reason. His picture may have its counterpart in fact; and