Some twelve years since we read Mr. Tylor's well-known and able work on _Primitive Culture_, and were much impressed with the evident fair-mindedness and courageous impartiality which distinguished the author so notably from the Clodds, the Allens, the Laings, and other popularizers of the uncertain results of evolution-philosophy. For this very reason we made a careful analysis of the whole work, and more particularly of his "animistic" hypothesis, and laid it aside, waiting, according to our wont, for further light bearing upon a difficulty wherewith we felt ourselves then incompetent to deal. This further light has been to some extent supplied to us by Mr. Andrew Lang's _Making of Religion_, which deals mainly with that theory of animism which is propounded by Mr. Tylor, and unhesitatingly accepted, dogmatically preached, and universally assumed, by the crowd of sciolists who follow like jackals in the lion's wake. Without denying the value of our conceptions of God and of the human soul, Mr. Tylor believes that these conceptions, however true in themselves, originated on the part of primitive man in fallacious reasoning from the data of dreams and of like states of illusory vision. He assumes, perhaps with some truth, that the distinction between dream and reality is more faintly marked in the less developed mind; in the child than in the adult, in the savage than in the civilized man. Hence a belief arises in a filmy phantasmal self that wanders abroad in sleep and leaves the body untenanted, and meets and converses with other phantasmal selves. Nor is it hard to see how death, being viewed as a permanent sleep, should be ascribed to the final abandonment of the body by its "dream-stuff" occupant. Whether as dreaded or loved or both, this ever-gathering crowd of disembodied spirits wins for itself a certain _cultus_ of praise and propitiation, and reverence, and is humoured with food-offerings and similar sacrifices. Nor is it long before the form of an earthly polity is transferred to that unearthly city of the dead, till for one reason or another some jealous ghost gains a monarchic supremacy over his brethren, and thus polytheism gives place to monotheism. It need not be that this supreme deity is always conceived as a defunct ancestor, once embodied, but no longer in the body. Rather it would seem that the primitive savage, having once arrived at the conception of a ghost, passes by generalization to that of incorporeal beings unborn and undying, of spirits whose presence and power is revealed in stocks and stones, or in idols shaped humanwise--spirits who preside over trees, rivers, and elements, over species and classes and departments of Nature, over tribes and peoples and nations; until, as before, the struggle for existence or some other cause gives supremacy to some one god fittest to survive either through being more conceivable, or more powerful, or in some other way more popular than the rest of the pantheon.