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The Parsee worships fire, the Japanese bows before foxes and snakes, the Hindu deifies cows and monkeys. Why should not the Chinese have their swine as objects of veneration? There are certain forms of what is called Christian worship which are by no means above comparison with even Chinese extravagance.
That's when the sentimentalism gushes out, at the end of long journeys, at the novelty of elegance and sophistication. One deifies them then: one gives them a place much larger than they ought to take up in life. How Muene-Motapa would laugh! He, virtually a Neolithic man, never sinks below manly thoughts: his ambitions are never enfeebled by the malady of sentimental love.
The Parsee still worships fire; the uneducated Japanese bows before snakes and foxes; the Hindoo deifies cows and monkeys. Why should we wonder, then, that the Toltecs worshiped idols a thousand years ago?
When the anarchist deifies even the veriest wreck of society this individual, "this god, though in the germ" when he inflames it with dignity and with pride, when he fills its whole being with a thirst for awful and incredible vengeance, you have Duval, Lingg, Ravachol, Luccheni, and Bonnot.
"The praefect is dead, O Augusta, and the people will soon forget him. Rome deifies thee because of thy great kinsman. Having forgotten the hero of their choice they will readily turn to thee whom they love. They will accept from thy hands the Cæsar whom thou wilt choose." My lord Hortensius after that first feeling of anger had soon recovered his serenity.
Ayrault stood musing and regretting the necessity of such general death. "But," he thought, "I would rather die than lose my love; for then I should have had the taste of bliss without its fulfilment, and should be worse off than dead. Love gilds the commonplace, and deifies all it touches.
"We think a good deal of strenuousness," objected the bishop. "Have you not noticed that whenever anything, however fantastic, is imposed upon men by physical forces, they straightway make a god of it? That is why you deify strenuousness. You dare not forgo it. The Eskimo doubtless deifies seal-blubber; he could not survive without it.
The writings of Bakounin, Nechayeff, Kropotkin, and Most; the miserable conditions which surround the life of a multitude of impoverished people; the often savage repression of any attempts on the part of the workers to improve their conditions; corrupt courts and parliaments and unjust laws; a false conception of ethics; a high-wrought nervous tension combined with compassion; the egocentric philosophy which deifies the individual and would press its claims even to the destruction of all else in the world; these are no doubt the chief underlying causes of the terrorism of the last forty years.
In other cases, the human beast first crucifies, and then glorifies or deifies the nobler minds, who swayed by the Spirit, do not live as others live, in quest of higher ideals by which to benefit the race; he, one of the noblest champions of humanity, a hero, a saint, a martyr in this cause has never had his resurrection yet a forgotten brave.
He does not eliminate his animal instincts, he only deifies and tries to explain them, but as this cannot be done without excessive simplification according to the law of the mind which in order to grasp must let go an equal amount he disguises and intensifies them in one direction.
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