forest."--P. 101.

This apparatus of transition is ingenious enough, but surely it is
utterly uncalled for. The same uncultured imagination that could animate
a tree, could people the air with gods. Whenever the cause of any
natural event is _invisible_, the imagination cannot rest in Fetishism;
it must create some being to produce it. If thunder is to be
theologically explained--and there is no event in nature more likely to
suggest such explanation--the imagination cannot animate the thunder; it
must create some being that thunders. No one, the discipline of whose
mind had not been solely and purely _scientific_, would have created for
itself this difficulty, or solved it in such a manner.[51]

[51] At the end of the same chapter from which this extract is
taken, the _Doctor_ tells a story which, if faith could be put
in the numerous accounts which men relate of themselves, (and
such, we presume, was the original authority for the anecdote,)
might deserve a place in the history of superstition.

"One of the most distinguished men of the age, who has left a
reputation which will be as lasting as it is great, was, when a
boy, in constant fear of a very able but unmerciful
schoolmaster; and in the state of mind which that constant fear
produced, he fixed upon a great spider for his fetish, and used
every day to pray to it that he might not be flogged."

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