miseries of human life.”  The Orphic societies of Greece seem to have been peculiarly ascetic, taking no animal food save raw flesh from the sacrificed ox of Dionusos.  And Plato speaks of a lower grade of Orphic priests, Orpheotelestai, “who used to come before the doors of the rich, and promise, by sacrifices and expiatory songs, to release them from their own sins, and those of their forefathers;” and such would be but too likely to get a hearing from the man who was afraid of a weasel or an owl.

Now, this same bodily fear, I verily believe, will be found at the root of all superstition whatsoever.

But be it so.  Fear is a natural passion, and a wholesome one.  Without the instinct of self-preservation, which causes the sea-anemone to contract its tentacles, or the fish to dash into its hover, species would be extermined wholesale by involuntary suicide.

Yes; fear is wholesome enough, like all other faculties, as long as it is controlled by reason.  But what if the fear be not rational, but irrational?  What if it be, in plain homely English, blind fear; fear of the unknown, simply because it is unknown?  Is it not likely, then, to be afraid of the wrong object? to be hurtful, ruinous to animals as well as to man?  Any one will confess that, who has ever seen, a horse inflict on himself mortal injuries, in his frantic attempts to escape from a quite imaginary danger.  I have good reasons for believing that not only animals here and there, but whole flocks and swarms of them, are often destroyed, even in the wild state, by mistaken fear; by such panics, for instance, as cause a whole herd of buffaloes to rush over a bluff, and be dashed to pieces.  And remark that this capacity of panic, fear—­of superstition, as I should call it—­is greatest in those animals, the dog and the horse for instance, which have the most rapid and vivid fancy.  Does not the unlettered Highlander say all that I want to say, when he attributes to his dog and his horse, on the strength of these very manifestations of fear, the capacity of seeing ghosts and fairies before he can see them himself?

But blind fear not only causes evil to the coward himself:  it makes him a source of evil to others; for it is the cruellest of all human states.  It transforms the man into the likeness of the cat, who, when she is caught in a trap, or shut up in a room, has too low an intellect to understand that you wish to release her:  and, in the madness of terror, bites and tears at the hand which tries to do her good.  Yes; very cruel is blind fear.  When a man dreads he knows not what, he will do he cares not what.  When he dreads desperately, he will act desperately.  When he dreads beyond all reason, he will behave beyond all reason.  He has no law of guidance left, save the lowest selfishness.  No law of guidance:  and yet his intellect, left unguided, may be rapid and acute enough to lead him into terrible follies.  Infinitely more imaginative