hed by erroneous processes. All scientific verities have been
attained in this manner, by a gradual modification and improvement
of inadequate working hypotheses, by the slow substitution of
correctness for error. Thus monotheism and the doctrine of the soul
may be in no worse case than the Copernican theory, or the theory of
the circulation of the blood, or the Darwinian theory; itself the
successor of innumerable savage guesses, conjectures of Empedocles,
ideas of Cuvier, of the elder Darwin, of Lamarck, and of Chambers.

At present, of course, the theistic hypothesis, and the hypothesis
of a soul, do not admit of scientific verification. The difficulty
is to demonstrate that 'mind' may exist, and work, apart from
'matter'. But it may conceivably become verifiable that the
relations of 'mind' and 'matter' are, at all events, less obviously
and immediately interdependent, that will and judgment are less
closely and exclusively attached to physical organisms than modern
science has believed. Now, according to the anthropological theory
of the origin of religion, it was precisely from the opposite of the
scientific belief,--it was from the belief that consciousness and
will may be exerted apart from, at a distance from, the physical
organism,--that the savage fallacies began, which ended, ex
hypothesi, in monotheism, and in the doctrine of the soul. The
savage, it is said, started from normal facts, which he
misinterpreted. But suppose he started, not from normal facts
alone, but also from abnormal facts,--from facts which science does
not yet recognise at all,--then it is possible that the conclusions
of the savage, though far too sweeping, and in parts undeniably
erroneous, are yet, to a certain extent, not mistaken. He may have
had 'a sane spot in his mind,' and a sane impulse may have led him
into the right direction. Man may have faculties which savages
recognise, and which physical science does not recognise. Man may
be surrounded by agencies which savages exaggerate, and which
science disregards altogether, and these faculties and agencies may
point to an element of truth which is often cast aside as a survival
of superstition, as the 'after-image' of an illusion.

The lowest known stage, and, according to the evolutionary
hypothesis, the earliest stage in religion, is the belief in the
ghosts of the dead, and in no other spiritual entities. Whether
this belief anywhere exists alone, and untempered by