erious way produced all phenomena; that disease and health,
happiness and misery, fortune and misfortune, peace and war, life and
death, success and failure, were but arrows shot by those ghosts or
shadowy phantoms, to reward or punish mankind; that they were
displeased or pleased by our actions, that they blessed the earth with
harvest or cursed it with famine; that they fed or starved the children
of men; that they crowned or uncrowned kings; that they controlled war;
that they gave prosperous voyages, allowing the brave mariner to meet
his wife and children inside the harbor bar, or strewed the sad shore
with wrecks of ships and the bodies of men. Formerly these ghosts were
believed to be almost innumerable. Earth, air and water were filled
with these phantoms, but in modern times they have greatly decreased in
number, because the second proposition that I stated, the supernatural
and the natural, has generally been adopted, but the remaining ghosts
are supposed to perform the same functions as of yore.

Let me say right here that the object of every religion ever made by
man has been to get on the good side of supposed powers; has been to
petition the gods to stop the earthquakes, to stop famine, to stop
pestilence. It has always been something that man should do to prevent
being punished by the powers of the air or to get from them some
favors. It has always been believed that these ghosts could in some way
be appeased; that they could be bettered by sacrifices, by prayer, by
fasting, by the building of temples and cathedrals, by shedding the
blood of men and beasts, by forms, by ceremonies, by kneelings, by
prostrations and flagellations, by living alone in the wild desert, by
the practice of celibacy, by inventing instruments of torture, by
destroying men, women and children, by covering the earth with
dungeons, by burning unbelievers and by putting chains upon the
thoughts and manacles upon the lips of men, by believing things without
evidence, by believing things against evidence, by disbelieving and
denying demonstrations, by despising facts, by hating reason, by
discouraging investigation, by making an idiot of yourself--all these
have been done to appease the winged monsters of the air.

In the history of our poor world no horror has been omitted, no infamy
has been left undone by believers in ghosts, and all the shadows were
born of cowardice and malignity; they were painted by the pencil of
fear upon t