Spencer laboriously tries to persuade us that the worship of the Sun and the Moon arose, not from man's natural reverence for these great and beautiful powers of Nature, but solely as they were thought to be the abodes of the disembodied spirits of dead ancestors. Animal worship, tree and plant worship, fetichism, the Confucian worship of heaven, all, he would have us believe, take their origin entirely from the idea that these objects contain the spirits of the dead. If this is not "persistent thinking along defined grooves," I know not what it is.
The case of China is decisive. There we have a religion of vast antiquity and extent, perfectly clear and well ascertained. It rests entirely on worship of Heaven, and Earth, and objects of Nature, regarded as organized beings, and not as the abode of human spirits. There is in the religion and philosophy of China no notion of human spirits, disembodied and detached from the dead person, conceived as living in objects and distinct from dead bodies. The dead are the dead; not the spiritual denizens of other things. In the face of this, the vague language of missionaries and travellers as to the beliefs of savages must be treated with caution. Mr. Spencer speaks in too confident language of his having "proved" and "disproved" and "shown" all these things in his "Descriptive Sociology" and in his "Principles of Sociology." How many competent persons has he convinced? Assuredly, for my part, I read and re-read all that he there says about the genesis of religion with amazement. We read these authorities for ourselves, and we can not see that they bear out his conclusions. It was a pity to refer to the tables in the "Descriptive Sociology," perhaps the least successful of all Mr. Spencer's works. That work is a huge tile of cuttings from various travellers of all classes, extracted by three gentlemen whom Mr. Spencer employed. Of course these intelligent gentlemen had little difficulty in clipping from hundreds of books about foreign races sentences which seem to support Mr. Spencer's doctrines. The whole proceeding is too much like that of a famous lawyer who wrote a law-book, and then gave it to his pupils to find the "cases" which supported his law. It is a little suspicious that we find so often at the head of each "susperstition" of the lower races a heading in almost the same words to the effect: "Dreams, regarded as visits from the spirits of departed relations." The intelligent gentlemen employed have done their work very well; but of course one can find in this medley of tables almost any view. And I find facts which make for my view as often as any other.
Fetichism, says Mr. Spencer, is not found in the lowest races. Be that as it may, it is found wherever we can trace the germs of religion. Well, I read in the "Descriptive Sociology" that Mr. Burton, perhaps the most capable of all African travellers, declares that "fetichism is still the only faith known in East Africa." In other places, we read of the sun and moon, forests, trees, stones, snakes, and the like regarded with religious reverence by the savages of Central Africa.
