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LECTURE III.
127 different degrees of certainty, and I am the very last person to slur them over, and to represent all our results as equally certain. But if we want to arrive at terra firma, we must not mind a plunge now and then; and if we wish to mount a ladder, we must not be afraid of taking the first step. The coincidences between the religious phraseology of Chinese and other Turanian languages are certainly not like the coincidences between Greek and Sanskrit, or between Hebrew and Phoeniciang but they are such that they ought not to be passed over by the pioneers of a new science.
You remember that the popular worship of ancient China was a worship of single spirits, of powers, or, we might almost say, of names, the names of the most prominent powers of nature which are supposed to exercise an influence for good or evil on the life of man. We find a belief in spirits of the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the mountains, the rivers; to say nothing as yet of the spirits of the departed.
In China, where there always has been a strong tendency towards order and regularity, some kind of system has been superinduced by the recognition of two powers, one active, the other passive, one male, the other female, which comprehend everything, and which, in the mind of the more enlightened, tower high above the great crowd of minor spirits. These two powers are within and beneath and behind everything that is double in nature, and they have frequently been identified with heaven and earth.
We can clearly see, however, that the spirit of heaven occupied from the beginning a much higher
