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