basest--is, if properly defined, nothing less
or more than the fear of doing wrong; of becoming a worse man.

But what has that to do with mere fear of the unseen? The fancy which
conceives the fear is physical, not spiritual. Think for yourselves.
What difference is there between a savage's fear of a demon, and a
hunter's fear of a fall? The hunter sees a fence. He does not know what
is on the other side: but he has seen fences like it with a great ditch
on the other side, and suspects one here likewise. He has seen horses
fall at such, and men hurt thereby. He pictures to himself his horse
falling at that fence, himself rolling in the ditch, with possibly a
broken limb; and he recoils from the picture he himself has made; and
perhaps with very good reason. His picture may have its counterpart in
fact; and he may break his leg. But his picture, like the previous
pictures from which it was compounded, is simply a physical impression on
the brain, just as much as those in dreams.

Now, does the fact of the ditch, the fall, and the broken leg, being
unseen and unknown, make them a spiritual ditch, a spiritual fall, a
spiritual broken leg? And does the fact of the demon and his doings,
being as yet unseen and unknown, make them spiritual, or the harm that he
may do, a spiritual harm? What does the savage fear? Lest the demon
should appear; that is, become obvious to his physical senses, and
produce an unpleasant physical effect on them. He fears lest the fiend
should entice him into the bog, break the hand-bridge over the brook,
turn into a horse and ride away with him, or jump out from behind a tree
and wring his neck--tolerably hard physical facts, all of them; the
children of physical fancy, regarded with physical dread. Even if the
superstition proved true; even if the demon did appear; even if he wrung
the traveller's neck in sound earnest, there would be no more spiritual
agency or phenomenon in the whole tragedy than there is in the parlour
table, when spiritual somethings make spiritual raps upon spiritual wood;
and human beings, who are really spirits--and would to heaven they would
remember that fact, and what it means--believe that anything has happened
beyond a clumsy juggler's trick.

You demur? Do you not see that the demon, by the mere fact of having
produced physical consequences, would have become himself a physical
agent, a member of physical Nature, and therefore to be explained, he and