Page:The Story of Philosophy.pdf/455

 the others, and coördinating them into their hierarchy of special rôles. The first gods were probably suggested by dreams and ghosts. The word spirit was, and is, applied equally to ghosts and gods. The primitive mind believed that in death, or sleep, or trance, the ghost or spirit left the body; even in a sneeze the forces of expiration might expel the spirit, so that a protective "God bless you!"—or its equivalent—became attached to this dangerous adventure. Echoes and reflections were sounds and sights of one's ghost or double; the Basuto refuses to walk by a stream, lest a crocodile should seize his shadow and consume it. God was, at first, only "a permanently existing ghost." Persons who had been powerful during their earthly lives were believed to keep their power in their ghostly appearance. Among the Tannese the word for god means, literally, a dead man. "Jehovah" meant "the strong one," "the warrior": he had been a local potentate, perhaps, who was worshiped after his death as the "god of hosts." Such dangerous ghosts had to be propitiated: funeral rites grew into worship, and all the modes of currying favor with the earthly chief were applied to the ceremonial of prayer and the appeasement of the gods. Ecclesiastical revenues originated in gifts to the gods, just as state revenues began as presents to the chief. Obeisances to kings became prostration and prayer at the altar of the god. The derivation of the god from the dead king shows clearly in the case of the Romans, who deified rulers before their death. In such ancestor-worship all religion seems to have its origin. The power of this custom may be illustrated by the story of the chief who refused baptism because he was not satisfied with the answer to his query as to whether he would meet his unbaptized ancestors in heaven. (Something of this belief entered into the bravery of the Japanese in the war of 1905;