their position. Mr. Tylor, with his unique fairness, says
'the degeneration theory, no doubt in some instances with justice, may
claim such beliefs as mutilated and perverted remains of higher religion'
(vol. ii. p. 336).

I do not pretend to know how the lowest savages evolved the theory of a
God who reads the heart and 'makes for righteousness,' It is as easy,
almost, for me to believe that they 'were not left without a witness,'
as to believe that this God of theirs was evolved out of the maleficent
ghost of a dirty mischievous medicine-man.

Here one may repeat that while the 'quaint or majestic foreshadowings'
of a Supreme Being, among very low savages, are only sketched lightly
by Mr. Tylor; in Mr. Herbert Spencer's system they seem to be almost
omitted. In his 'Principles of Sociology' and 'Ecclesiastical
Institutions' one looks in vain for an adequate notice; in vain for almost
any notice, of this part of his topic. The watcher of conduct, the
friendly, creative being of low savage faith, whence was he evolved? The
circumstance of his existence, as far as I can see; the chastity, the
unselfishness, the pitifulness, the loyalty to plighted word, the
prohibition of even extra-tribal homicide, enjoined in various places on
his worshippers, are problems that appear somehow to have escaped
Mr. Spencer's notice. We are puzzled by endless difficulties in his
system: for example as to how savages can forget their great-grandfathers'
very names, and yet remember 'traditional persons from generation to
generation,' so that 'in time any amount of expansion and idealisation can
be reached,'[19]

Again, Mr. Spencer will argue that it is a strange thing if 'primitive men
had, as some think, the consciousness of a Universal Power whence they and
all other things proceeded,' and yet 'spontaneously performed to that
Power an act like that performed by them to the dead body of a fellow
savage'--by offerings of food.[20]

Now, first, there would be nothing strange in the matter if the crude idea
of 'Universal Power' came _earliest_, and was superseded, in part, by a
later propitiation of the dead and ghosts. The new religious idea would
soon refract back on, and influence by its ritual, the older conception.
And, secondly, it is precisely this 'Universal Power' that is _not_
propitiated by offerings of food, in Tonga, (despite Mr. Huxley)
Australia, and Africa, for example. We cannot escape the difficulty by
saying that there