ty to
drunkenness existing in all nations bears witness. When the great actor
in his personation of Rip Van Winkle holds his goblet aloft and says,
"Here's to your health and to your family's, and may they live long and
prosper," he connects the act of drinking with a prayer, and
unconsciously demonstrates the origin of the use of stimulants. It may
be that when the jolly companion has become a loathsome sot, and his
mind is ablaze with the fire of drink, and he sees uncouth beasts in
horrid presence, that inherited memories haunt him with visions of the
beast-gods worshipped by his ancestors at the very time when the
appetite for stimulants was created.

But ecstasism is produced in other ways, and for this purpose the savage
and barbarian often resorts to fasting and bodily torture. In many ways
he produces the wonderful state, and the visions of ecstasy are
interpreted as the evidence of spirits.

Many physical phenomena serve to confirm this opinion. It is very late
in philosophy when shadows are referred to the interception of the rays
of the sun. In savagery and barbarism, shadows are supposed to be
emanations from or duplicates of the bodies causing the shadows. And
what savage understands the reflection of the rays of the sun by which
images are produced? They also are supposed to be emanations or
duplications of the object reflected. No savage or barbarian could
understand that the waves of the air are turned back, and sound is
duplicated in an echo. He knows not that there is an atmosphere, and to
him the echo is the voice of an unseen, personage--a spirit. There is no
theory more profoundly implanted in early mankind than that of
spiritism.

_Thaumaturgics._--The gods of mythologic philosophies are created to
account for the wonders of nature. Necessarily they are a wonder-working
folk, and, having been endowed with these magical powers in all the
histories given in mythic tales of their doings on the earth, we find
them performing most wonderful feats. They can transform themselves;
they can disappear and reappear; all their senses are magical; some are
endowed with a multiplicity of eyes, others have a multiplicity of ears;
in Norse mythology the watchman on the rainbow bridge could hear the
grass grow, and wool on the backs of sheep; arms can stretch out to
grasp the distance, tails can coil about mountains, and all powers
become magical. But the most wonderful power with which the gods are
endowed is