ich requires defining. The statement means what {148}
Professor Tylor expresses later on in the words: "It scarcely appears
as though any savage prayer, authentically native in its origin, were
ever directed to obtain moral goodness or to ask pardon for moral sin"
(p. 373). But it might be misunderstood to mean that among savages it
was customary or possible to pray for things recognised by the savage
himself as wrong, and condemned by the community at large. In the
first place, however, the god of the community simply as being the god
of the community would not tolerate such prayers. Next, the range and
extent of savage morality is less extensive than it is--or at any rate
than it ought to be--in our day; and though we must recognise and at
the right time insist upon the difference, that ought not to make us
close our eyes to the fact that the savage does pray to do the things
which savage morality holds it incumbent on him to do, for instance to
fight bravely for the good of his wife, his children, and his tribe, to
carry out the duty of avenging murder. And if he prays for wealth he
also prays for wisdom; if he prays that his god may deliver him from
sickness, that shows he is human rather than that he is a low type of
humanity.

It would seem, then, that though in religions of low {149} culture we
meet religion under the guise of desire, we also find that religion
makes a distinction between desires; there are desires which may be
expressed to the god of the community, and desires which may not.
Further, though it is in the heart of a person and an individual that
desire must originate, it does not follow that prayer originates in
individual desire. To say so, we must assume that the same desire
cannot possibly originate simultaneously in different persons. But
that is a patently erroneous assumption: in time of war, the desire for
victory will spring up simultaneously in the hearts of all the tribe;
in time of drought, the prayer for rain will ascend from the hearts of
all the people; at the time of the sowing of seed a prayer for "the
kindly fruits of the earth" may be uttered by every member of the
community. Now it is precisely these desires, which being desires must
originate in individual souls, yet being desires of every individual in
the community are the desires of the community, that are the desires
which take the form of prayer offered by the community or its
representative to the god of the commu