Mr. Spencer, indeed, speaks frequently of living human beings adored as gods.  I do not know that these are found on the lowest levels of savagery, and Mr. Jevons has pointed out that, before you can hail a man as a god, you must have the idea of God.  The murder of Captain Cook notoriously resulted from a scientific experiment in theology.  ’If he is a god, he cannot be killed.’  So they tried with a dagger, and found that the honest captain was but a mortal British mariner—­no god at all.  ’There are degrees.’  Mr. Spencer’s men-gods become real gods—­after death.[1]

Now the Supreme Being of savage faith, as a rule, never died at all.  He belonged to a world that knew not Death.

One cause of our blindness to the point appears to be this:  We have from childhood been taught that ‘God is a Spirit.’  We, now, can only conceive of an eternal being as a ‘spirit.’  We know that legions of savage gods are now regarded as spirits.  And therefore we have never remarked that there is no reason why we should take it for granted that the earliest deities of the earliest men were supposed by them to be ‘spirits’ at all.  These gods might most judiciously be spoken of, not as ‘spirits,’ but as ‘undefined eternal beings.’  To us, such a being is necessarily a spirit, but he was by no means necessarily so to an early thinker, who may not yet have reached the conception of a ghost.

A ghost is said, by anthropologists, to have developed into a god.  Now, the very idea of a ghost (apart from a wraith or fetch) implies the previous death of his proprietor.  A ghost is the phantasm of a dead man.  But anthropologists continually tell us, with truth, that the idea of death as a universal ordinance is unknown to the savage.  Diseases and death are things that once did not exist, and that, normally, ought not to occur, the savage thinks.  They are, in his opinion, supernormally caused by magicians and spirits.  Death came into the world by a blunder, an accident, an error in ritual, a decision of a god who was before Death was.  Scores of myths are told everywhere on this subject.[2]

The savage Supreme Being, with added power, omniscience, and morality, is the idealisation of the savage, as conceived of by himself, minus fleshly body (as a rule), and minus Death.  He is not necessarily a ‘spirit,’ though that term may now be applied to him.  He was not originally differentiated as ‘spirit’ or ‘not spirit.’  He is a Being, conceived of without the question of ‘spirit,’ or ‘no spirit’ being raised; perhaps he was originally conceived of before that question could be raised by men.  When we call the Supreme Being of savages a ‘spirit’ we introduce our own animistic ideas into a conception where it may not have originally existed.  If the God is ’the savage himself raised to the n^th power’ so much the less of a spirit is he.  Mr. Matthew Arnold might as well have said:  ’The British Philistine has no