Modern thought has deanthropomorphised what was left of anthropomorphic in religion, and, in the end, has left us for God, at most, ’a stream of tendency making for righteousness,’ or an energy unknown and unknowable—­the ghost of a ghost.  For the soul, by virtue of his belief in which man raised himself in his own esteem, and, more or less, in ethical standing, is left to us a negation or a wistful doubt.

To this part of modern scientific teaching the earlier position of this essay suggests a demurrer.  By aid of the tradition of and belief in supernormal phenomena among the low races, by attested phenomena of the same kinds of experience among the higher races, I have ventured to try to suggest that ‘we are not merely brain;’ that man has his part, we know not how, in we know not what—­has faculties and vision scarcely conditioned by the limits of his normal purview.  The evidence of all this deals with matters often trivial, like the electric sparks rubbed from the deer’s hide, which yet are cognate with an illimitable, essential potency of the universe.  Not being able to explain away these facts, or, in this place, to offer what would necessarily be a premature theory of them, I regard them, though they seem shadowy, as grounds of hope, or, at least, as tokens that men need not yet despair.  Not now for the first time have weak things of the earth been chosen to confound things strong.  Nor have men of this opinion been always the weakest; not among the feeblest are Socrates, Pascal, Napoleon, Cromwell, Charles Gordon, St. Theresa, and Jeanne d’Arc.

I am perfectly aware that the ‘superstitiousness’ of the earlier part of this essay must injure any effect which the argument of the latter part might possibly produce on critical opinion.  Yet that argument in no way depends on what we think about the phenomena—­normal, supernormal, or illusory—­on which the theory of ghost, soul, or spirit may have been based.  It exhibits religion as probably beginning in a kind of Theism, which is then superseded, in some degree, or even corrupted, by Animism in all its varieties.  Finally, the exclusive Theism of Israel receives its complement in a purified Animism, and emerges as Christianity.

Quite apart, too, from any favourable conclusion which may, by some, be drawn from the phenomena, and quite apart from the more general opinion that all modern instances are compact of imposture, malobservation, mythopoeic memory, and superstitious bias, the systematic comparison of civilised and savage beliefs and alleged experiences of this kind cannot wisely be neglected by Anthropology. Humani nihil a se alienum putat.

[Footnote 1:  Prim.  Cult. ii. 352.]

[Footnote 2:  Abridged from Prim.  Cult. ii. 119.]