of the species. It is absurd to say of men in a
state of primitive savagery, that all their conceptions are in a
theological state. Nine-tenths of them are eminently realistic, and as
"positive" as ignorance and narrowness can make them. It no more occurs
to a savage than it does to a child, to ask the why of the daily and
ordinary occurrences which form the greater part of his mental life. But
in regard to the more striking, or out-of-the-way, events, which force
him to speculate, he is highly anthropomorphic; and, as compared with a
child, his anthropomorphism is complicated by the intense impression
which the death of his own kind makes upon him, as indeed it well may.
The warrior, full of ferocious energy, perhaps the despotic chief of
his tribe, is suddenly struck down. A child may insult the man a moment
before so awful; a fly rests, undisturbed, on the lips from which
undisputed command issued. And yet the bodily aspect of the man seems
hardly more altered than when he slept, and, sleeping, seemed to himself
to leave his body and wander through dreamland. What then if that
something, which is the essence of the man, has really been made to
wander by the violence done to it, and is unable, or has forgotten, to
come back to its shell? Will it not retain somewhat of the powers it
possessed during life? May it not help us if it be pleased, or (as seems
to be by far the more general impression) hurt us if it be angered? Will
it not be well to do towards it those things which would have soothed
the man and put him in good humour during his life? It is impossible to
study trustworthy accounts of savage thought without seeing, that some
such train of ideas as this, lies at the bottom of their speculative
beliefs.

There are savages without God, in any proper sense of the word, but none
without ghosts. And the Fetishism, Ancestor-worship, Hero-worship, and
Demonology of primitive savages, are all, I believe, different manners
of expression of their belief in ghosts, and of the anthropomorphic
interpretation of out-of-the-way events, which is its concomitant.
Witchcraft and sorcery are the practical expressions of these beliefs;
and they stand in the same relation to religious worship as the simple
anthropomorphism of children, or savages, does to theology.

In the progress of the species from savagery to advanced civilization,
anthropomorphism grows into theology, while physicism (if I may so call
it) develops into scie