The Golden Bough (Third Edition, Vol. 7 of 12) - Mirrors

Preface. 5the sexes to each other, with all the depths of tenderness and allthe intricate problems which that mysterious relation involves.The study of the various forms, some gross and palpable, somesubtle and elusive, in which the sexual instinct has moulded thereligious consciousness of our race, is one of the most interesting,as it is one of the most difficult and delicate tasks, which awaitthe future historian of religion.But the influence which the sexes exert on each other, intimateand profound as it has been and must always be, is far indeedfrom exhausting the forces of attraction by which mankind arebound together in society. The need of mutual protection, theeconomic advantages of co-operation, the contagion of example,the communication of knowledge, the great ideas that radiatefrom great minds, like shafts of light from high towers,—theseand many other things combine to draw men into communities,to drill them into regiments, and to set them marching on theroad of progress with a concentrated force to which the looseskirmishers of mere anarchy and individualism can never hopeto oppose a permanent resistance. Hence when we consider howintimately humanity depends on society for many of the boonswhich it prizes most highly, we shall probably admit that of allthe forces open to our observation which have shaped humandestiny the influence of man on man is by far the greatest. Ifthat is so, it seems to follow that among the beings, real orimaginary, which the religious imagination has clothed with theattributes of divinity, human spirits are likely to play a moreimportant part than the spirits of plants, animals, or inanimateobjects. I believe that a careful examination of the evidence,which has still to be undertaken, will confirm this conclusion;and that if we could strictly interrogate the phantoms which thehuman mind has conjured up out of the depths of its bottomlessignorance and enshrined as deities in the dim light of temples,we should find that the majority of them have been nothing butthe ghosts of dead men. However, to say this is necessarily to[ix]