Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/441

 spirits of dead men" ; "that at the bottom of all these imaginary changes lies the belief in survival, the notion that death is transmigration". This needs to be connected with what he describes as "the habit of detecting human spirits everywhere". That "habit" he considers to lead to the deification of humanity," "which is throughout so much the strongest element in the shaping of superstitious imagery that it gradually absorbs all other elements". And is this not originally because man gathers up in the supremacy of his "brain-power" all that he himself observes and experiences? And does he not thus realise on the emotional level the attraction of a human and divine gravitation, and dimly feel, that no more than the earth he lives on is he his own centre or his own pivot; but that his life is orbital and satellitic—though, of course, any such term must needs be taken in a simply symbolical sense? If so, what he is growing towards is the further realisation that such centre itself is but a unit in the vast universe of truth. "The origin of the divine species, the descent of the deities from man", will thus be interpreted as parallel to the idea of projection which underlay so much ancient thinking about the earth and the stars. Therein man thought that he had himself thrown off the "mental" lights which have lightened all mankind; but at last he finds that he and all his doings and thinkings are in a true sense dependent on that very outside world which he had supposed to be dependent upon, and even produced by, the forces of this planet; ex-citation, the call from without, is recognised as the secret of all his activities.

So we return to the conjecture "that the original bent or form of natural religion had been moulded upon the deep impression stamped on primitive minds by the perpetual death and reappearance, or resuscitation, of animate things". And the lecturer traces in the upper grades of Hinduism "the full growth and maturity of these primordial ideas". Here we come to something better than any mere analogy; we get a far-reaching and carefully thought-out application of principles which lie deep in the constitution of nature. Assuming that "Brahma, the creative energy, is too remote and abstract an influence for popular worship", the writer looks upon Siva as representing what