LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
'MR. HERBERT SPENCER ON PRIMITIVE
SUPERSTITIONS.
[To THE ED/TOR OF THZ " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Allow me to correct a statement made in the review of Mr. Lang's book on "The Making of Religion" contained in the Spectator of July 16th. The reviewer classes me as one of those who believe that the "beginnings of superstitions ideas" arose from the universal conviction or feeling that all things in Nature are endowed with the sentient vitality and the unruly affections of mankind." I entertain no such belief. In the first part of "The Principles of Sociology" I have devoted a whole chapter to repudiation of that belief : arguing that primitive man has no tendency whatever to ascribe animation to inanimate things. On the other hand, throughout a long succession of chapters, containing facts which were complained of as superabundant, I have elabo- rated the doctrine that the ghost-theory, primarily suggested by experiences of dreams and secondarily confirmed by evidence from abnormal forms of insensibility, daring which the ghost is supposed to be away, is the sole source of super- stitions. I have contended that only when there has been established this conception of a ghost capable of leaving the body and re-entering it, and supposed to have gone away at death to return after a longer interval, does there arise the conviction that ghosts are capable of entering other things than insensible human bodies; and that in this way there presently arises the notion that inanimate things have in- -dwelling spirits. This ascription to me (not by your reviewer 'only, who has been misled, but by sundry others) of a belief which I have emphatically rejected, is one of many examples ehowing me how impossible it is to exclude misunderstand- ings.—I am, Sir, Scc., Boughton Monchelsea, July 18th. HERBERT SPENCER.
[We regret to have unintentionally misrepresented Mr. Herbert Spencer's view.—En. Spectator.]
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