Without entering into any consideration of what Mr. Harrison has disproved or proved, as between fetichism and the ghost-theory, I will now ask why the beliefs of the uncivilized races, or of the primitive men, should be regarded as important evidence of the origin of beliefs among civilized and cultivated men? Is modern philosophy, in accounting for or justifying the belief in a Supreme Being which is held to-day by most of the cultivated and educated part of mankind, to assign its origin to the primitive and uncivilized men? Is the whole idea of a supernatural being to be regarded as traditionally handed down from our barbarian ancestors? Is there no other source from which we can derive that idea? Are we none of us capable of finding for ourselves rational grounds of belief in a supernatural agent, deducing his existence from a study of nature? Or must we trace this belief back through the ages until we arrive at an origin which we shall of course despise? What has philosophy to do now with "the primitive religion"? Is there nothing that science and reason and disciplined methods of thought and sound deduction can teach us? Are we to throw away all the proofs which nature spreads before us, and for the investigation of which we have accumulated so many facilities, and turn to the beliefs of uncivilized men? Are the conceptions of supernatural beings, to which a barbarian attained, to be taken as the origin of the conception of a personal God to which an educated philosopher can now attain? And because of the inadequate and childish superstitions of the past, and of their growth into a belief of one supreme supernatural agent--whatever that idea of him may have been--is the consciousness which we have of a personal God to be hereafter merged into a consciousness of an Omnipresent Power to which no attributes can be ascribed? It should seem that the mode in which philosophy, after it came to be cultivated by civilized thinkers and observers, freed itself first from fetichism and the ghost-theory and all the beliefs of polytheism, next from physical agents as the causes of all phenomena, and finally attained an independent conception of a First Cause as a supreme personal intelligence and power, is worthy of some consideration.