able_, we have
supplied, in Animism, under advancing social conditions, what he does not
seem to provide, a cause and _modus_ of degeneration. Fetishism would
thus be really 'secondary,' _ex hypothesi_, but as we nowhere find
Fetishism alone, without the other elements of religion, we cannot say,
historically, whether it is secondary or not. Fetishism logically needs,
in some of its aspects, the doctrine of spirits, and Theism, in what we
take to be its earliest known form, does not logically need the doctrine
of spirits as given matter. So far we can go, but not farther, as to the
fact of priority in evolution. Nevertheless we meet, among the most
backward peoples known to us, among men just emerged from the palaeolithic
stage of culture, men who are involved in dread of ghosts, a religious
Idea which certainly is not born of ghost-worship, for by these men,
ancestral ghosts are not worshipped.

In their hearts, on their lips, in their moral training we find (however
blended with barbarous absurdities, and obscured by rites of another
origin) the faith in a Being who created or constructed the world; who was
from time beyond memory or conjecture; who is primal, who makes for
righteousness, and who loves mankind. This Being has not the notes of
degeneration; his home is 'among the stars,' not in a hill or in a house.
To him no altar smokes, and for him no blood is shed.

'God, that made the world and all things therein, seeing that He is lord
of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is
worshipped with men's hands, as though He needed any thing ... and hath
made of one blood all nations of men ... that they should seek the Lord,
if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far
from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being.'

That the words of St. Paul are literally true, as to the feeling after a
God who needs not anything at man's hands, the study of anthropology seems
to us to demonstrate. That in this God 'we have our being,' in so far
as somewhat of ours may escape, at moments, from the bonds of Time and the
manacles of Space, the earlier part of this treatise is intended to
suggest, as a thing by no means necessarily beyond a reasonable man's
power to conceive. That these two beliefs, however attained (a point on
which we possess no positive evidence), have commonly been subject to
degeneration in the religions of the world, is only too obv