ideas as those of creation and
independence are quite foreign to the primitive mind. Savages are like
children in this respect; their interest in things is primarily of a
practical character. A child does not begin by asking how a thing came
to be; it asks what it is for or what it does. So the prime concern of
the savage is, what are certain things for? what will they do? are they
injurious or beneficial? It is because of this practical turn of mind
that so much attention is paid to the ghost, having once accepted its
existence as a fact. The superiority of the gods do not consist in their
substantial difference from himself, but in the greater power for good
or evil conferred upon them by their invisible existence. Creation is a
conception that does not arise until the capacity for philosophical
speculation has developed. Then reflection sets to work; the nature of
the god undergoes modification, and the long process of accommodating
primitive religious beliefs to later knowledge commences, the end of
which we have not yet seen.

The process of reading modern speculations into the religion of the
savage leads to some curious results, one of which we cannot forbear
mentioning. In his little work on "Animism" Mr. Edward Clodd, after
tracing the fundamental ideas of religion to primitive delusion, says:--

Herein (_i.e._, in dream and visions) are to be found the sufficing
materials for a belief in an entity in the body, but not of it,
which can depart and return at will, and which man everywhere has
more or less vaguely envisaged as his "double" or "other self."...
The distinction between soul and body, which explained to man his
own actions, was the key to the actions of animate and inanimate
things. A personal life and will controlled them. This was
obviously brought home to him more forcibly in the actions of
living things, since these so closely resembled his own that he saw
no difference between themselves and him. _Not in this matter alone
have the intuitions of the savage found their confirmation in the
discoveries of modern science_.... Ignorant of the reflection of
sound, how else could he account for the echoes flung back from the
hillside? Ignorant of the law of the interruption of light, how
else could he explain the advancing and retreating shadows? _In
some sense they must be alive; an inference supported by modern
sci