the minds of those who are subject to them. Looking on man as an organic part of nature, nowise separable from it while he is in it, and as increasing in faculty only so far as he gains from it-as the nature-made mean by which nature is progressively modified—it is legitimate to view these transcendent functions of mind as functions gone astray, and to conclude the right method of mental culture to be, not to develop such malfunction by artificial internal means, but by natural external culture of large extent and varied character so to nourish, consolidate, and fortify the mind as to render such abnormal development difficult or impossible. He must consent to relinquish the vain quest for absolute truth, of which he is incapable, and be content to use the relative truth of which he is capable, for the humble purposes of a gradually progressive development.

2 A

STATEMENT OF THE CONCLUSION.

If the facts and arguments set forth in the foregoing pages are soundly based and sound in themselves, they go a long way to show that malobservation and misinterpretation of nature have been the unsound foundations of theories of the supernatural; that its seeming phenomena have not ever been, nor are ever now, events of the external world, but have always been, and are, fables of the imagination; that the concern and interest of them are purely psychological,—mankind, like one floating down a stream, having imagined its movements to be a movement of the unmoving land. Lacking, therefore, any vestige of solid support in sound observation and reasoning, they survive in modern thought only by virtue of their pretensions to a supernatural authority above all observation and reasoning. Poor, indeed, they were but for that pretension, and none so poor as to do them reverence. By bringing the phenomena within the compass of scientific investigation, and setting

forth the modes of their natural origin and growth, the need and credit of such authority are alike invalidated, at the same time that the obligations of scientific method are fulfilled. If it come to pass in the last days that a Spirit is poured out on all flesh, so that sons, and daughters, and servants, and handmaidens prophesy, and young men see visions and old men dream dreams, one may fairly anticipate that the strange events will be considered, not as evidences of supernatural influx, but as phenomena belonging to the domain of medical psychology.

Notwithstanding the long history and the large influence of supernatural beliefs in human thought, it is no more difficult to conceive their ceasing to be than to conceive their coming into being. The one may well happen just as inevitably as we have every reason to believe that the other happened; to die is as natural to a superstition as to be born. Certainly it has been, and still is, a disputed point whether there is now, or ever was anywhere, a savage nation devoid of some glimmering notions of religion; by which is always meant apparently some notions of spiritual beings, fine or coarse in quality, and of the continuance of the individual spirit after the death of its body. The evidence of travellers is contradictory, some of them declaring positively that they have encountered savages who were without the least trace of such

beliefs, while others, claiming to have taken greater pains to enter into the thoughts and feelings of these uncultured people, believe they have discovered the most positive evidence of the existence of them.*

The dispute in the end is not of very weighty moment; for if the theory of evolution be true, as persons of all creeds seem to be gradually inclining their hearts and minds to admit, there must have been a point somewhere in the becoming of man when the divine spirit was breathed first into him and he became a living soul capable of supernatural beliefs and immortal longings. That admission excludes the notion of their universality. Moreover, those who, ignoring this insuperable difficulty in their way, claim the universality of them in proof of the truth of spiritual things, ought to weigh well these reflections: first, that savages have the most plentiful supply of spiritual existences, since they ascribe spirits, not to men and women only, but to horses and other animals, and even to bows and arrows, axes, knives, and other implements of warfare and utensils of do

*So far as it goes, the evidence appears to prove that most savages have some sort of notions of supernatural beings and of another life, but that some few very low savages are entirely destitute of any notions of the kind. The supernatural notions entertained are of all degrees of crudity, and almost as various as the peoples. One might say of them as Jeremiah exclaimed to the idolatrous Jews, "According to the number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah" (Jer. ii. 28).

mestic use, which they bury with their dead, in order that these may have the use of the spirit-forms of them in the spiritual world; * second, that it has been an undeniable result of the progress of human culture through the ages to contract the range and thin the number of spiritual existences, as well as gradually to attenuate and refine the character of them; all inanimate and most animate objects having been by degrees divested of their spiritual nature, and the pale, dim, ethereal shade or ghost-like phantom of the bodily form, lingering and pining around the scenes of its life in the body-which is the savage's crude notion of a spirit-having been raised by sublimation to the spiritual height and refinement of an

* The savage, in fact, assigns its special spirit to each material thing, and regards spirit as a sort of finely attenuated matter. The Indian of Guiana, for example, believes that every material object has its spirit, and that the spirits of things and persons can leave them at will to do just what they could do when united to their bodies. He is convinced that everything which he sees and suffers in dreams is real, his detached spirit actually doing and undergoing what he dreams, and will take vengeance on any one by whom he dreams that he has been injured. As a consequence, he holds that some persons can send out their spirits at will and do great harm to any one whom they wish to injure-administer poison, inflict pain, produce disease, cause death. Natural disease being inconceivable to him, he cannot understand how any one should die unless he were injured by the spirit sent forth by one of these persons whom he calls a "kenaima." To protect himself from this mysterious agency of evil, he has recourse to the medicineman, or peaiman, who keeps off the kenaima by his ceremonials, and drives them away when they have entered his body and caused sickness. (Among the Indians in Guiana, by Everard im Thurn.)