Or Applied Social Science as Based upon Statical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences

With regard to the actual nature of religion, as exemplified in the various races of men, Mr. Spencer agrees more nearly with Mr. Tylor than with Sir John Lubbock. Indeed, his ghost theory "differs little in itself from the “animism” of Tylor. Mr. Spencer, however, has ideas of his own respecting the origin of the belief in spiritual beings which are very entertaining. He considers ancestor-worship as the basis of all the higher forms of worship, and this to grow out of the belief in the persistence of the spirit of dead ancestors. With Mr. Tylor, he traces the belief in spiritual beings to the notions early entertained by savages respecting a double self, suggested by such familiar phenomena as shadows, echoes, reflections, dreams, swoons, epilepsy, apoplexy, etc. He argues forcibly against the natural direct origin of any of the definite forms of religious belief, and maintains that they have all arisen from ancestor-worship in indirect ways the fetich, plant, animal, star, or imaginary deity having in all cases represented, more or less immediately, the tribal ancestor whose name and attributes it bears. If this view be correct, government must in all cases have antedated religion, and be adduces many cases in support of the view that, where no form of headship exists, not even fetichism is found. The following passage from the “Data of Ethics”(1*) gives a very complete condensed view of Mr. Spencer's argument: “As fast as the ghost-theory becomes established and definite, there grows up another kind of check on the immediate satisfaction of the desires a check constituted by ideas of the evils which ghosts may inflict if offended; and when political headship gets settled, and the ghosts of dead chiefs, thought of as more powerful and more relentless than