Thus, in religion, the Darumulun, or other Supreme Being of the lowest known savages, men roaming wild, when originally met, on a continent peopled by older kinds of animals than ours, was (as we regard purity) on a higher plane by far than the gods of Greeks and Semites in their earliest known myths.  Setting mythology aside and looking only at cult, the God of the Murring or the Kurnai, whose precepts soften the heart, who knows the heart’s secrets, who inculcates chastity, respect of age, unselfishness, who is not bound by conditions of space or place, who receives no blood of slaughtered man or beast, is a conception from which the ordinary polytheistic gods of infinitely more polite peoples are frankly degenerate.  The animistic superstitions wildly based on the belief in the soul have not soiled him, and the social conditions of aristocracy, agriculture, architecture, have not made him one in a polytheistic crowd of rapacious gods, nor fettered him as a Baal to his estate, nor localised him in a temple built with hands.  He cannot appear as a ’God of Battles;’ no Te Deum can be sung to him for victory in a cause perhaps unjust, for he is the Supreme Being of a certain group of allied local tribes.  One of these tribes has no more interest with him than another, and the whole group do not, as a body, wage war on another alien group.  The social conditions of his worshippers, then, preserve Darumulun from the patent blots on the escutcheon of gods among much more advanced races.

Once more, the idea of Animism admits of endless expansion.  A spirit can be located anywhere, in any stone, stick, bush, person, hill, or river.  A god made on the animistic model can be assigned to any department of human activity, down to sports, or lusts, or the province of Cloacina.  Thus religion becomes a mere haunted and pestilential jungle of beliefs.  But the theistic conception, when not yet envisaged as spiritual, cannot be subdivided and eparpille.  Thus, from every point of view, and on every side, Animism is full of the seeds of religious degeneration, which do not and cannot exist in what I take to be the earliest known form of the theistic conception:  that of a Being about whose metaphysical nature—­spirit or not spirit—­no questions were asked, as Dr. Brinton long ago remarked.

That conception alone could neither supply the moral motive of ’a soul to be saved,’ nor satisfy the metaphysical instinct of advancing mankind.  To meet these wants, to supply ‘soul,’ with its moral stimulus, and to provide a phrase or idea under which the Deity could be envisaged (i.e. as a spirit) by advancing thought, Animism was necessary.  The blending of the theistic and the animistic beliefs was indispensable to religion.  But, in the process of animistic development under advancing social conditions, degeneration was necessarily implied.  Degeneration of the theistic conception for a while, therefore, occurred.  The facts are the proofs; and only contradictory facts, in sufficient quantity, can annihilate the old theory of Degeneration when it is presented in this form.