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 his doings, by physical laws? If you do not see
that conclusion at first sight, think over it till you do.

It may seem to some that I have founded my theory on a very narrow
basis; that I am building up an inverted pyramid; or that,
considering the numberless, complex, fantastic shapes which
superstition has assumed, bodily fear is too simple to explain them
all.

But if those persons will think a second time, they must agree that
my base is as broad as the phenomena which it explains; for every
man is capable of fear. And they will see, too, that the cause of
superstition must be something like fear, which is common to all
men: for all, at least as children, are capable of superstition;
and that it must be something which, like fear, is of a most simple,
rudimentary, barbaric kind; for the lowest savage, of