The Hibbert Lecturer for this year, Count Goblet d'Alviella, Professor
of the History of Religions in the University of Brussels, who lectures in French, is not very fortunate in the reports of his lectures, which are so brief and general as to convey little nourishment, as Madame Mohl used to call it. But in his second lecture, on " The Genesis of the Notion of the Divine," he gave an interesting account of the view of Mr. Van Eude, who, it seems, attributes to the higher animals all the religious sentiments commonly supposed to belong exclusively to man. " The Redskin converses with his horse, and the Arab believes that the noblest of his steeds can read the Koran ; while the natives of Borneo maintain that the tigers have a sultan and a court." These are interesting superstitions, but have they much relation to "the genesis of the notion of the divine"? Even if the Arabian horse could read the Koran, and were consequently a Mahommedan, that would not show that the Arabians themselves derived their religion from their horses, but rather that their horses derived it from them. And even if the Bornose tigers had a sultan, and that sultan held a court, there would be nothing to show that the Bornese derived either their politics or their religion from the tigers, only because they attributed to the tigers their own political institutions. The more freely man attributes his own ideas to creatures with which he has no real means of communi- cating, the more clear it is that it is in man that these ideas take their origin,
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