whatever he is
not capable, is still superstitious, often to a very ugly degree.
Superstition seems, indeed, to be, next to the making of stone-
weapons, the earliest method of asserting his superiority to the
brutes which has occurred to that utterly abnormal and fantastic
lusus naturae called man.

Now let us put ourselves awhile, as far as we can, in the place of
that same savage; and try whether my theory will not justify itself;
whether or not superstition, with all its vagaries, may have been,
indeed must have been, the result of that ignorance and fear which
he carried about with him, every time he prowled for food through
the primeval forest.

A savage's first division of nature would be, I should say, into
things which he can eat and things which can eat him: including, of
course, his most formidable enemy, and most savoury food--his
fellow-man. In finding out what he can eat, we must remember, he
will have gone through much experience which will have inspired him
with a serious respect for the hidden wrath of nature; like those
Himalayan folk, of whom Hooker says, that as they know every
poisonous plant, they must have tried them all--not always with
impunity.

So he gets at a third class of objects--things which he cannot eat,
and which will not eat him; but will only do him harm, as it seems
to him, out of pure malice, like poisonous plants and serpents.
There are natural accidents, too, which fall into the same category,
stones, floods, fires, avalanches. They hurt him or kill him,
surely for ends of their own. If a rock falls from the cliff above
him, what more natural than to suppose that there is some giant up
there who threw it at him? If he had been up there, and strong
enough, and had seen a man walking underneath, he would certainly
have thrown the stone at him and killed him. For first, he might
have eaten the man after; and even if he were not hungry, the man
might have done him a mischief; and it was prudent to prevent that
by doing him a mischief first. Besides, the man might have a wife;
and if he killed the man, then the wife would, by a very ancient law
common to man and animals, become the prize of the victor. Such is
the natural man, the carnal man, the soulish man, the [Greek] of St.
Paul, with five tolerably acute senses, which are ruled by five very
acute animal passions--hunger, sex, rage, vanity, fear. It is with
the working of the last passion, fear, that this lecture has