_7. The Journey of the Soul._—Lastly, I mention the cycle which describes the journey of the soul after death. The extraordinary similarity which I and others have pointed out between the opinions on this subject among Egyptians, Greeks, ancient Celts, and North American Indians,[151] is not to be explained by any theory of inter-communication, nor “by chance,” as some have argued, but by fixed psychic laws, working over the same material under similar conditions. The soul passes toward the west, crosses a sea or river to the abode of the departed, and meets everywhere nearly the same obstacles, to be overcome by proper preparations and mortuary ceremonies. I need not rehearse the details. They can be compared elsewhere. But their substantial identity confirms in an emphatic manner the thesis I am advocating, that in these universal mythical cycles we are dealing not with fragments of some one set of fancies borrowed from a common source, but with independent creations of the human intellect, framed under laws common to it everywhere, and which tend always to produce fruits generically everywhere the same. LECTURE IV. Primitive Religious Expression: In the Object. CONTENTS:—Visual Ideas—Fetishism—Not Object-Worship only—Identical with Idolatry—Modern Fetishism—Animism—Not a Stadium of Religion—The Chief Groups of Religious Objects: 1. The Celestial Bodies—Sun and Moon Worship—Astrolatry; 2. The Four Elements—Fire, Air (the Winds), Water, and the Earth—Symbolism of Colours; 3. Stones and Rocks—Thunderbolts—Memorial Stones—Divining Stones; 4. Trees and Plants—The Tree of Life—The Sacred Pole and the Cross—The Plant-Soul—The Tree of Knowledge; 5. Places and Sites—High Places and Caves; 6. The Lower Animals—The Bird, the Serpent, etc.; 7. Man—Anthropism in Religion—The Worship of Beauty; 8. Life and its Transmission—Examples—Genesiac Cults—The Fatherhood of God—Love as Religion’s Crown. If we analyse the concepts which occupy our minds, we shall find that most of them are derived from the sense of sight; they are what psychologists call “visual ideas.” To these alone we owe the notions of space, size, form, colour, brightness, and motion. By filling the brain with such images, sight becomes a mental stimulus of the highest order, and as we find it exerting its influence in other directions, so in the development of the religious sense it has always held a conspicuous place. It has led to the objective expression of that sense under visible forms, in images, pictures, sacred structures, symbolic colours and shapes, and natural substances.