Excerpt from The Relation of the Medicine-Man to the Origin of the Professional Occupations IN the last volume of his Synthetic Philosophy (principles of Sociology, Vol. III, pp. 179 - 324, Professional Institutions) Mr. Herbert Spencer has made an attempt to work out a special application of his ghost theory of the origin of worship, in the thesis that the medicine-man is the source and origin of the learned and artistic occupations. This is a very fascinating theory and has in it elements of truth and of ver'isimilitude, but it is very far from affording a true view either of the place of the medicine-man in the development of society or of the origins of the occupations. It does not, indeed, seem probable that Spencer would have made this elaborate and somewhat strained effort to give the medicine-man a pre-eminent place in the develop ment of the occupations if he had not been in a way committed to this course by his defective theory of the origin of worship in attention to dead ancestors. But having settled upon his theory, Spencer in these chapters pushes to the limit his habit of selecting the evidence favorable to his theory and omitting or brushing away the unfavorable evidence. Moreover, he has here resorted to a device which I believe he has not before used to any extent, that of giving evidence of an indeterminate character and claiming that by implication it is favorable to his argument. But after these detractions we must, as usual, admit that Spencer has opened up a new field of inves tigation and has treated it in a most suggestive manner. With a View to determining the amount of truth in the conclusions of Spencer, I will examine his statements in approximately the order they are made; and I will at the same time present some evi dence, both from the sources used by Spencer and from other sources, tending to establish a different view of the relation of the medicine-man to the occupations. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.