Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/472

458 personalized by "a disease of language." Personalization exists at the outset; and the worship is in all cases the worship of an indwelling ghost-derived being.

That these conclusions are necessitated by an exhaustive examination of the evidence, is shown by the fact that they have been forced on Dr. E. B. Tylor notwithstanding his original enunciation of other conclusions. In a lecture "On Traces of the Early Mental Condition of Man," delivered at the Royal Institution on the 15th of March, 1867, he said:—

Here, having first noted that the conception of Fetichism derived by Dr. Tylor from multitudinous facts, is not like that of Mr. Harrison, who conceives Fetichism to be a worship of the objects themselves, and not a worship of their indwelling spirits, we further note that Dr. Tylor regards this ascription of souls to all objects, inanimate as well as animate, which he proposes to call Animism rather than Fetichism, as being primordial. In the earlier part of his "Primitive Culture," published in 1871, we find a re-statement of this view; but further on we observe a modification of it, as instance the following sentence in vol. ii, p. 100.

And then, in articles published in "Mind" for April and for July, 1877, Dr. Tylor represented himself as holding a doctrine identical with that set forth by me in the "Principles of Sociology"; namely, that the belief in a human ghost is original, and that the beliefs in spirits inhabiting inanimate objects, giving rise to Fetichism and Nature-worship, are derived beliefs.

An emphatic negative is thus given to Mr. Harrison's assertion that "Nothing is more certain than that man everywhere started with a simple worship of natural objects." And if he holds that "the bearing of this on the future of religion is decisive"—if, as he says, "the religion of man in the vast cycles of primitive ages was reverence for nature as influencing Man," and if, as he infers, "the religion of man in the vast cycles that are to come will be the reverence for Humanity as supported by Nature"—if, as it thus seems, primitive religion as conceived by him is a basis for what he conceives to be the