Similarly, why resort to an ancestor worship to explain zoolatry? What is more natural, for example, than the universal veneration for the snake? This mysterious creature which glides away among the shadows, appears, and disappears, and carries with it power of life and death? Or instead of a serpent, consider the lion, or any other ferocious animal. He makes his appearance in a country and creates havoc among the flocks; one pursues him, but for some reason or other no shot reaches him; he is invulnerable. He becomes increasingly audacious and terrible; he disappears for weeks together, nobody knows where; he reappears suddenly, nobody knows why; he defies the hunters with the majesty that wild beasts sometimes show, in perfect consciousness of their power. Behold! a veritable god. It is well known that the aborigines worshipped the horses which the Spaniards imported into America; according to Prescott, they preferred to attribute the invention of firearms to the horses rather than to the Spaniards. The fact is simply that the Spaniards were men like themselves, and that the aborigines took their measure accordingly; but an unknown animal came to them armed with an indefinite power. Men adore nothing but what they are comparatively ignorant of, and it is for that reason, whatever Mr. Spencer may say, that nature, so long imperfectly known, afforded to religion a more generous and inexhaustible aliment than humanity. [Sidenote: Narrowness and insufficiency of Spencer’s formula.] At bottom what Mr. Spencer regards as the true confirmation of his doctrine is the relation it bears to the rest of his system; it is for him an example simply of a universal law, a consequence of evolution. According to this doctrine, everything seems to spring from a primordial unity, from a single homogeneous belief—the belief in a power more or less vague, exercised by the souls of the dead; this belief, once given, undergoes a complete series of integrations and differentiations, and ultimately becomes a belief in the regular action of an unknown and universal power. Mr. Spencer seems to us to be right in pitching upon the one homogeneous belief from which all others arise by a process of evolution; but the formula of this belief that he presents us with seems to us altogether too narrow and insufficient. If one wishes to discover the idea which dominates both the cult for the dead and the cult for the gods, one will find in it a natural persuasion that nothing is absolutely and definitively inanimate, that everything lives and possesses, therefore, intentions and volitions. Man has deified the phenomena of nature, as he has immortalized his ancestors, for the sole and only reason that, as a living being possessed of a will, the most difficult thing in the beginning for him to understand is the invincible determinism and absolute inertia of the phenomena of the external world.[19] [19] See our _Morale anglaise contemporaine_, p. 579.