stages of life is rather in the size of the
toys played with, than in the way they are regarded. So too we are apt
to look on foreign, and still more on savage language, symbolism, ways,
and customs, as indicative of a far more radical difference and greater
inferiority of mental constitution and ethical instincts than really
exists. Mr. Kidd, in his book on Social Evolution, has contended with
some plausibility that the brain-power of the Bushman and of the Cockney
is much on a par at starting, and that the subsequent divergence is due
chiefly to education and moral training; and certainly much of the
evidence brought forward in Mr. Lang's volume seems to look that way. If
the aboriginal Australian has a faith in the immortality of the soul and
in a supreme God, the rewarder of righteousness, if he summarizes the
laws of God under the precept of unselfishness; if in all this he is but
a type of the universal savage, surely it were well if some of the
missionary zeal which is devoted to supplying the heathen with Bibles
which they cannot understand, were turned to the work of bringing our
own godless millions up to their religious level.

But this takes us to the second and still more interesting part of _The
Making of Religion_, which we shall have to discuss in the next section.
At present we only wish to insist that it is a mistake to assume that
because savages and children are, when compared with ourselves, so
little, therefore their thoughts and ideas can be understood with little
difficulty. Contrariwise, as the apparent difference in life and
language is greater, the deeper and more patient investigation will it
need to detect that radical sameness of mental and moral constitution
which binds men together far more than diversity of education and
environment can ever separate them. It is, therefore, exceedingly
unlikely that either the child or the savage should, by failing to
distinguish between dream and reality, introduce into his whole life
that incoherence which is just the distinguishing characteristic of
dreaming and lunacy. And, as a fact, do we really find the savage as
depressed, on waking, by a dreamt-of calamity as by a real one; or as
elated after a visionary scalping of foes as after a real victory? Does
he on waking look for the said scalps among his collection of trophies,
and is he perplexed and incensed at not finding them? Even if, like
ourselves, he has occasionally a very vivid and coherent dr