Again, it is assumed that the gods of primitive man are non-ethical, that they do not "make for righteousness;" that they are at most jealous powers to be feared and propitiated. When the savage speaks of a god as good, he only means "favourable to me," "on my side;" he does not mean "good to me if I am good." God is conceived first as power and force; then as non-moral wisdom, or cunning, and only in the very latest developments as holy and just and loving. Starting with the assumptions of evolutionists, the theory is plausible enough. Nor is it inconceivable that God, without using error and evil directly as a means to truth and good, should passively permit error for the sake of the truth that He foresees will come out of it. Astrology was not incipient astronomy; nor was alchemy primitive chemistry; the end and aim in each case was wholly different. Yet the pseudo-science gave birth to the true; as false premisses often lead by bad logic to sound conclusions. Totemism, "a perfectly crazy and degrading belief," says Mr. Lang, "rendered possible--nay, inevitable--the union of hostile groups into large and relatively peaceful tribal societies.... We should never have educated the world thus; and we do not see why it should have been thus done. But we are very anthropomorphic, and totally ignorant of the conditions of the problem." In like manner it might have been, that God willed to let men wander through the slums and backways of animism into the open road of theism. But our concern is not with what might have been, but with what was. Mr. Lang contends, first, that belief in spirits and in a circumambient spiritual world, more probably originated in certain real or imaginary experiences of supernormal phenomena, than in a fallacious explanation of dreams; then, that belief in a supreme god is most probably not derived from or dependent upon belief in ghosts. Consistently with the whole trend of his thought in his recent work connected with psychical research, in _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, in _Cock-Lane and Common-Sense_, Mr. Lang begins by entering a protest against the attitude observed towards the subject by contemporary science, especially by anthropology, which, as having been so lately "in the same condemnation," might be expected to show itself superior to that injustice which it had itself so much reason to complain of. Yet anthropology, abandoning the first principles of modern science, still refuses to listen to the facts alleged by psychical research, and justifies its refusal on Hume's oft-exploded fallacy, namely, on an _à priori_ conviction of their impossibility and therefore of their non-occurrence.