This apparatus of transition is ingenious enough, but surely it is utterly uncalled for. The same uncultured imagination that could animate a tree, could people the air with gods. Whenever the cause of any natural event is _invisible_, the imagination cannot rest in Fetishism; it must create some being to produce it. If thunder is to be theologically explained--and there is no event in nature more likely to suggest such explanation--the imagination cannot animate the thunder; it must create some being that thunders. No one, the discipline of whose mind had not been solely and purely _scientific_, would have created for itself this difficulty, or solved it in such a manner.[51] [51] At the end of the same chapter from which this extract is taken, the _Doctor_ tells a story which, if faith could be put in the numerous accounts which men relate of themselves, (and such, we presume, was the original authority for the anecdote,) might deserve a place in the history of superstition. "One of the most distinguished men of the age, who has left a reputation which will be as lasting as it is great, was, when a boy, in constant fear of a very able but unmerciful schoolmaster; and in the state of mind which that constant fear produced, he fixed upon a great spider for his fetish, and used every day to pray to it that he might not be flogged." * * * * * End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX., by Various