Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/308

300 V.—My fifth Query is: May not origins of the notion of Supernals—or, to use Dr. Tylor's words, of "Spiritual Beings up to the highest Deities"—be suggested far more probably verifiable than the explanation of these origins given in the theory of Animism?

We have thus far considered the theory of Animism as an attempt to account for the conception of Nature as animated. We have now to consider it as an attempt also to account for the conception of "Spirits" associated with Nature. In other words, we have now to consider the theory of Animism as a theory of the origin of the notion of Gods. In the theory so far common to both Mr. Spencer and Dr. Tylor the notion of Gods "up", as Dr. Tylor expressly says, "to the highest", owes its origin, first of all, to the observations and meditations of Savages on such phenomena as shadows, reflexions, dreams, etc. For, as result of these observations and meditations, the notion of "souls", "ghosts", and "spirits" was developed. And from this notion—and, in Mr. Spencer's theory, more especially from Ancestral Ghosts—all Gods (and he expressly includes the Semitic Yahveh) have originated. But the starting-point in this theoretical development—namely, observations and meditations of Savages on shadows, etc.—I have, under the Third Query, endeavoured to show to be wholly unverifiable and contradictory even of the facts admitted by Mr. Spencer and Dr. Tylor themselves. Instead, therefore, of starting from unverifiable assumptions as to the observations and meditations of Primitive Savages, I would start from those conceptions of the objects of Nature as themselves Powers, which, as I have endeavoured to show in discussing the Second Query, must be accepted as a necessary postulate. Let us admit, then,