'Fear begets gods,' said Lucretius. Hume concluded that 'the first ideas of religion arose ... from a concern with regard to the events of life and fears which actuate the human mind.' A similar opinion is maintained by most of our contemporaries. Among psychologists, Ribot, for instance, affirms that 'the religious sentiment is composed first of all of the emotion of fear in its different degrees, from profound terror to vague uneasiness, due to faith in an unknown, mysterious, impalpable Power.'[43] The fear-theory is well supported by two classes of interdependent facts observed, we are told, in every uncivilised people: (1) Evil spirits are the first to attain a certain degree of definiteness; (2) man enters into definite relations first with these evil spirits. If the reader will refer to _The Origin of Civilisation_ by Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock), 3rd ed., pp. 212-215, he will see there how widely true is the opinion expressed by Scheinfurth:--'Among the Bongos of central Africa good spirits are quite unrecognised, and, according to the general negro idea, no benefit can ever come from a spirit.' In many other tribes the good spirits are known, but the savage always 'pays more attention to deprecating the wrath of the evil than securing the favour of the good beings.' The tendency is to let alone the good spirits, because, being good, they will do us good of themselves, just as evil spirits do us harm unsolicited. Shall we, then, admit the fear-origin of Religion? Yes, provided it be understood that fear represents only one of the three constituents of Religion, that it is not in virtue of a particular quality or property that fear is the primitive emotional form of Religion, and that this admission is not intended to imply the impossibility of Religion having ever anywhere begun with aggressive or tender emotions. Regarding the second reservation, it should be understood that the making of Religion requires nothing found in fear that is not also present in other emotions. If aggressive emotions are not conspicuous at the dawn of Religion, it is only because it so happens that the circumstances in which the least cultured peoples known to us live are such as to keep fear in the foreground of consciousness. Fear was the first of the well-organised emotional reactions. It antedated the human species, and appears to this day first in the young animal, as well as in the infant. No doubt, before the protective fear-reaction could have been established, the lust of life had worked itself out into aggressive habits, those for the securing of food, for instance. But these desires did not, as early as in the case of fear, give rise to any emotional reaction possessing the constancy, definiteness, and poignancy of fear. The place of fear in primitive Religion is, then, due not to its intrinsic qualities, but simply to circumstances which made it appear first as a well-organised emotion vitally connected with the maintenance of life.