tion of God; nay,
perhaps a truer notion than those who affirm, without any sense of using
analogy, that God is a spirit. For if His spirituality is insisted on,
it is rather to exclude from Him the grossness and limitation of matter,
and to ascribe to Him a transcendental degree of whatever perfection our
notion of spirit may involve, than to classify Him, or to predicate of
Him that finite nature which we call a spirit. God is neither a spirit
nor a body; but rather like Ndengei of the Fijians: "an impersonation of
the abstract idea of eternal existence;" one who is to be "regarded as a
deathless _Being_, no question of 'spirit' being raised;" so that the
first intuition of the unsophisticated mind is found to be in more
substantial agreement with the last results of reflex philosophical
thought, than those early philosophizings which halt between the
affirmation and denial of bodily attributes, unable to prescind from the
difficulty and unable to solve it. The history of the Jews, nay, the
history of our own mind proves to demonstration that the thought of God
is a far easier thought and a far earlier, than that of a spirit. Our
mind, oar heart, our conscience, affirm the former instinctively, while
the latter does continual violence to our imagination, except so far as
spirit is misconceived to be an attenuated phantasmal body. Not only,
therefore, does the savage imagine God and speak of Him humanwise, as we
all do; but if he does not actually believe Him to be material, he at
least will be slow in mastering the thought of His spirituality.

Another assumption underlying the animistic hypothesis, and also
borrowed from Christian teaching, is that the savage regards the soul or
ghost as the liberated and consummated man, and that therefore he will
place God rather in the category of disembodied than of embodied men.
Yet not only the Greek and Roman, but even the Jew, looked on the shade
of the departed as a mere fraction of humanity, as a miserable residue
of man, helpless and hopeless, and withal disposed to be mischievous and
exacting, and therefore needing to be humoured in various ways. Nay,
even Christianity with its dogma of the bodily resurrection, denies that
Platonic doctrine which views the body as the prison rather than as the
complement and consort of the soul; although it holds the soul to be of
an altogether higher, because spiritual, order. But to the primitive
savage, who everywhere regards death as n