o allow unrestricted
conclusions to be drawn. Finally, we still know too little about the state
of culture of the savages; and the deeper and higher the intellectual and
ethical possessions of mankind are, the presence of which among the savages
is in question, the more uncertain is our knowledge.

This is especially true of the most important question in this
connection--the question as to the existence {93} or absence of an idea of
God, and the different stages of development of religious ideas. While some
assume as an established fact, that there are savage tribes without any
idea of God or any religion, and even give the names of these tribes,
especially of some from the interior of South America; while Sir John
Lubbock systematically enumerates seven stages of religious development,
from atheism to the connection of religious with moral conceptions, and
lets each single race run through these stages in an identical series until
it either remains on one of the seven stages or arrives at the highest:
yet, on the contrary, other equally trustworthy scientists assert that
there is not a single human race without some idea of religion and of a
God--indeed, not a single race without a monotheistic presentiment--and
that all heathenism, down to its most degenerate stages, consists not so
much in a non-recognition of a God as in ignoring him. They call especial
attention to the difficulty of getting acquainted with the ideas of a
savage tribe without living with it through many years and being intimate
with its language and customs, and especially without enjoying the
unrestricted confidence of the tribe. Mutual misunderstandings, a
suspicious reserve, evasive and untrue answers to questions, are entirely
unavoidable without those conditions. At any rate, the fact deserves
attention, that those who have been longest and most active among savages,
and who enjoyed their confidence to the fullest extent, all reached this
result: they found them not only not without religion, but also not without
a presentiment of the monotheistic idea of God. Livingstone, for instance,
expressed this idea decidedly of all the African tribes {94} with which he
became acquainted; and Jellinghaus gives the same evidence in regard to the
Kols in South Asia.

The _anatomic_ results of ethnology are more favorable to the descent
theory, although they too lead no farther than to the conclusion that the
skull-forms of the lowest tribes represent a lo