s our present knowledge goes, religion appears to be
universal among men. There is no community of which we can say with
certainty that it is without religion. There are some doubtful
cases--for example, certain Australian tribes reported on by Spencer and
Gillen, among whom it is difficult to discover any definite religious
feeling: they offer no sacrifices or petitions, and appear to recognize
no personal relations with any supernatural Power, beyond the belief
that the spirits of the dead are active in their midst, causing
sickness, death, and birth; nor is there any sign that they have lost
earlier more definite beliefs.[11] Yet they have solemn ceremonies in
which human blood plays a great part, and these may have reference to
the intervention of supernatural beings, the term "supernatural" being
taken as expressing any mysterious fact lying outside of the common
course of things. A mysterious being called Twan is spoken of in
initiation ceremonies, chiefly, it seems, to frighten or train the boys.
Is there an indication that the tribal leaders have risen above the
popular belief in such a being? Experience shows that it is difficult
for civilized men to get at the religious ideas of savages; and it is
possible, in spite of the careful investigations thus far made, that the
last word on Central Australian beliefs has not yet been spoken. A
similar reserve must be exercised in regard to reports of certain other
tribes, whose ceremonies and institutions have appeared to some European
and American observers to be without a religious element.[12]

+11+. There is at present no satisfactory historical evidence (whatever
psychological ground there may be, or whatever deduction from the theory
of evolution may seem necessary) of the existence of a subreligious
stage of human life--a stage in which there is only a vague sense of
some extrahuman power affecting man's interests, without definition of
the power, and without attempt to enter into social relations with
it.[13]

+12+. True, in the great mass of existing savage humanity we find social
and religious customs so definite that we are forced to suppose a long
preceding period of development. It has even been held that traces of
religious conceptions are discernible in the first surviving records of
"prehistoric" man, the contemporary of the cave bear--a period separated
from the earliest clear historical records by many millenniums;[14] but,
though the existence of su