2. Spirits, Human or Quasi-human, came First.--Is the worship of spirits then the original form of religions. This has been powerfully maintained in this country by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Tylor. According to Mr. Spencer "the rudimentary form of all religion is the propitiation of dead ancestors." Men concluded, as soon as they were capable of such reasoning, that the life they witnessed in plants and animals, in sun and moon and other parts of nature, was due to their being inhabited by the spirits of departed men. With all respect for the splendid exposition given by Mr. Spencer[2] of the early beliefs of mankind regarding spirits, it is impossible to think that he has made out his case when he treats the gods of early India and of Greece as deified ancestors. If the natural incredulity we feel at being told that Jupiter, Indra, the sun, the sacred mountain, and the stars all alike came to be worshipped because each of them represented some departed human hero, is not at once decisive, we have only to wait a little to see whether some other theory cannot account for these gods in a simpler way. [Footnote 2: _Sociology_, vol. i. Also _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, p. 675; "ghost-propitiation is the origin of all religions."] Mr. Tylor also derives all religion from the worship of spirits, but in a different way. His is the most comprehensive system of Animism, using that term in the narrower sense of soul-worship. Starting from the doctrine of souls, reached by early man in the way described above (p. 33, _sqq._), he argues that when once this notion was reached it would be applied to other beings as well as man. Not having learned to distinguish himself clearly from other beings, man would judge that they had souls like his own; and so every part of nature came to have its soul, and everything that went on in the universe was to be explained as the activity of souls. It was in this way, according to Mr. Tylor, that the view of the universal animation of nature, characteristic of early thought, was reached. "As the human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting spirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be carried on by other spirits." At this point the soul is an unsubstantial essence inhabiting a body, it has its life and activity only in connection with the body; but the step was easily taken to the further belief in spirits like the souls, but not attached to any body. The spirits moved about freely, like the genii, demons, fairies, and beings of all kinds, with whom to the mind of antiquity the world was so crowded.