a:

'From the notion of ghosts,' says Mr. Im Thurn, 'a belief has arisen, but
very gradually, in higher spirits, and eventually in a Highest Spirit,
and, keeping pace with the growth of these beliefs, a habit of reverence
for, and worship of spirits.... The Indians of Guiana know no God.'[1]

As another example of Mr. Im Thurn's hypothesis that God is a late
development from the idea of spirit may be cited Mr. Payne's learned
'History of the New World,' a work of much research:[2]

'The lowest savages not only have no gods, but do not even recognise those
lower beings usually called spirits, the conception of which has
invariably preceded that of gods in the human mind.'

Mr. Payne here differs, _toto caelo_, from Mr. Tylor, who finds no
sufficient proof for wholly non-religious savages, and from Roskoff, who
has disposed of the arguments of Sir John Lubbock. Mr. Payne, then, for
ethnological purposes, defines a god as 'a benevolent spirit, permanently
embodied in some tangible object, usually an image, and to whom food,
drink,' and so on, 'are regularly offered for the purpose of securing
assistance in the affairs of life.'

On this theory 'the lowest savages' are devoid of the idea of god or of
spirit. Later they develop the idea of spirit, and when they have secured
the spirit, as it were, in a tangible object, and kept it on board wages,
then the spirit has attained to the dignity and the savage to the
conception of a god. But while a god of this kind is, in Mr. Payne's
opinion, relatively a late flower of culture, for the hunting races
generally (with some exceptions) have no gods, yet 'the conception of a
creator or maker of all things ... obviously a great spirit' is 'one of
the earliest efforts of primitive logic.'[3]

Mr. Payne's own logic is not very clear. The 'primitive logic' of the
savage leads him to seek for a cause or maker of things, which he finds in
a great creative spirit. Yet the lowest savages have no idea even of
spirit, and the hunting races, as a rule, have no god. Does Mr. Payne mean
that a great creative spirit is _not_ a god, while a spirit kept on board
wages in a tangible object is a god? We are unable, by reason of evidence
later to be given, to agree with Mr. Payne's view of the facts, while his
reasoning appears somewhat inconsistent, the lowest savages having, in his
opinion, no idea of spirit, though the idea of a creative spirit is, for
all that, one of the earliest efforts of p