the conditions of the problem." In like manner it might have been, that
God willed to let men wander through the slums and backways of animism
into the open road of theism.

But our concern is not with what might have been, but with what was.

Mr. Lang contends, first, that belief in spirits and in a circumambient
spiritual world, more probably originated in certain real or imaginary
experiences of supernormal phenomena, than in a fallacious explanation
of dreams; then, that belief in a supreme god is most probably not
derived from or dependent upon belief in ghosts.

Consistently with the whole trend of his thought in his recent work
connected with psychical research, in _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, in
_Cock-Lane and Common-Sense_, Mr. Lang begins by entering a protest
against the attitude observed towards the subject by contemporary
science, especially by anthropology, which, as having been so lately "in
the same condemnation," might be expected to show itself superior to
that injustice which it had itself so much reason to complain of. Yet
anthropology, abandoning the first principles of modern science, still
refuses to listen to the facts alleged by psychical research, and
justifies its refusal on Hume's oft-exploded fallacy, namely, on an _a
priori_ conviction of their impossibility and therefore of their
non-occurrence.

However wide the range of experience upon which physical generalizations
are based, it can never be so wide as on this score alone to prove the
inherent possibility of exceptions; more especially when we consider the
confinement of the human race to what is relatively a momentary
existence on a whirling particle of dust in a sandstorm. There may
indeed be abundant evidence of a certain impetus or tendency enduring
from a comparatively distant and indefinite past and making for an
equally indefinite future; but there is not, cannot be evidence against
the possibility of interference from other laws whose paths, at points
unknown and incalculable, intersect those followed by the (to us)
ordinary course of events.

And in this wholesome agnosticism we are confirmed when we see that
while some animals are deprived of certain senses which we possess, and
all of them of the gift of reason, others are apparently endowed with
senses unknown to us, and are taught by seeming instincts which surpass
what reason could effect; whence we may infer that the likelihood of our
being _en rapport_ with the gre