The notion of a God about whose spirituality nobody has inquired is new to us.  To ourselves, and doubtless or probably to barbarians on a certain level of culture, such a Divine Being must be animistic, must be a ‘spirit.’  To take only one case, to which we shall return, the Banks Islanders (Melanesia) believe in ghosts, ’and in the existence of Beings who were not, and never had been, human.  All alike might be called spirits,’ says Dr. Codrington, but, ex hypothesi, the Beings ’who never were human’ are only called ‘spirits,’ by us, because our habits of thought do not enable us to envisage them except as ‘spirits.’  They never were men, ’the natives will always maintain that he (the Vui) was something different, and deny to him the fleshly body of a man,’ while resolute that he was not a ghost.[16]

This point will be amply illustrated later, as we study that strangely neglected chapter, that essential chapter, the Higher beliefs of the Lowest savages.  Of the existence of a belief in a Supreme Being, not as merely ‘alleged,’ there is as good evidence as we possess for any fact in the ethnographic region.

It is certain that savages, when first approached by curious travellers, and missionaries, have again and again recognised our God in theirs.

The mythical details and fables about the savage God are, indeed, different; the ethical, benevolent, admonishing, rewarding, and creative aspects of the Gods are apt to be the same.[17]

’There is no necessity for beginning to tell even the most degraded of these people of the existence of God, or of a future state, ’the facts being universally admitted.’[18]

’Intelligent men among the Bakwains have scouted the idea of any of them ever having been without a tolerably clear conception of good and evil, God and the future state; Nothing we indicate as sin ever appeared to them as otherwise,’ except polygamy, says Livingstone.

Now we may agree with Mr. Tylor that modern theologians, familiar with savage creeds, will scarcely argue that ’they are direct or nearly direct products of revelation’ (vol. ii. p. 356).  But we may argue that, considering their nascent ethics (denied or minimised by many anthropologists) and the distance which separates the high gods of savagery from the ghosts out of which they are said to have sprung; considering too, that the relatively pure and lofty element which, ex hypothesi, is most recent in evolution, is also, not the most honoured, but often just the reverse; remembering, above all, that we know nothing historically of the mental condition of the founders of religion, we may hesitate to accept the anthropological hypothesis en masse.  At best it is conjectural, and the facts are such that opponents have more justification than is commonly admitted for regarding the bulk of savage religion as degenerate, or corrupted, from its own highest elements.  I am by no means, as yet, arguing positively in favour of that hypothesis, but I see what its advocates mean, or ought to mean, and the strength of their position.  Mr. Tylor, with his unique fairness, says ’the degeneration theory, no doubt in some instances with justice, may claim such beliefs as mutilated and perverted remains of higher religion’ (vol. ii. p. 336).