Note RETURN — FOOTNOTES.

Man is characteristically a religious animal; in fact, as Socrates teaches, the only religious animal;13 for, though a dog has no doubt reverential emotions, it cannot be said with any propriety that he has religious ideas or ecclesiastical institutions, for a very good reason, because he has no ideas at all: observation he has very keen, and memory also wonderfully retentive; instincts also, like all primal vital forces, divine and miraculous; but ideas certainly none, for ideas mean knowledge; and brutes that have no language properly so called that is a system of significant vocal signs expressive of ideas, but only cries, gesticulations, and visible or audible signs expressive of sensations and feelings, can by no law of natural analogy be credited with the possession of a faculty of which they give no manifestation. Language is the outward body and form of which thought and reason and knowledge and ideas are the inward soul and force; and hence the wise Greeks, unlike our modern scientists, who delight in confounding man with the monkey, expressed language and reason with one word λόγος, while what we dignify with the name of language in birds and other animals was simply φωνή, or significant voice. If, therefore, there is any thing most human that history has to teach, it must be about religion. All the great nations whose names mark the march of human fates have been religious nations. A people without religion does not exist, or, if it does exist, it exists only as an abnormal and deficient specimen of the genus to which it belongs, which is of no more account in the just estimate of the type than a fox without a tail, or a lawyer without a tongue; and as for individual atheists, who have been talked about in ancient times, and specially in these latter days, they are either philosophers like Spinoza, the most pious of men, falsely baptized with an odious title from the stupidity, prejudice, or malice of the community, or, if they really are atheists, they are monsters which a man may stare at as at an ass with three heads or with no head at all in a show.