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 whatever he is
not capable, is still superstitious, often to a very ugly degree.
Superstition seems, indeed, to be, next to the making of stone-
weapons, the earliest method of asserting his superiority to the
brutes which has occurred to that utterly abnormal and fantastic
lusus naturae called man.
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