Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/121

Rh is as unable to appreciate the use and value of an idol, as the grown-up man is to realize the use of a doll to a child.

Man being the highest living creature that can be seen and imitated, it is natural that idols should mostly be imitations, more or less rude, of the human form. To show that the beings they represent are greater and more powerful than man, they are often huge in size, and sometimes, by a very natural expedient, several heads and pairs of arms and legs show that they have more wisdom, strength, and swiftness than man. The sun and moon, which in the physical system of the savage are often held to be living creatures of monstrous power, are represented by images. The lower animals, too, are often raised to the honour of personating supernatural powers, a practice which need not surprise us, when we consider that the savage does not set the lower animals at so great a depth below him as the civilized man does, but allows them the possession of language, and after his fashion, of souls, while we perhaps err in the opposite direction, by stretching the great gap which separates the lowest man from the highest animal, into an impassable gulf. Moreover, as animals have some powers which man only possesses in a less degree, or not at all, these powers may be attributed to a deity by personating him under the forms of the animals which possess them, or by giving to an image of human form parts of such animals; thus the feet of a stag, the head of a lion, or the wings of a bird, may serve to express the swiftness or ferocity of a god, or to show that he can fly into the upper regions of the air, or, like the goat's feet of Pan, they may be mere indications of his character and functions.

It is not necessary that the figure of a deity should have the characteristics of the race who worship it; the figure of another race may seem fitter for the purpose. Mr. Catlin, for instance, brought over with him a tent from the Crow Indians, which he describes as having the Great or Good Spirit painted on one side of it, and the Bad Spirit on the other. His drawing, unfortunately, only shows clearly one figure, in the unmistakable uniform of a white soldier with a musket in the one hand and a pipe in the other, and this may very likely be the figure of the Good