he belief in the evolution of this god out
of that ghost. These two factors in religion--ghost and god--seem to
have perfectly different sources, and it appears extraordinary that
anthropologists have not (as far as I am aware) observed this circumstance
before.

Mr. Spencer, indeed, speaks frequently of living human beings adored as
gods. I do not know that these are found on the lowest levels of savagery,
and Mr. Jevons has pointed out that, before you can hail a man as a god,
you must have the idea of God. The murder of Captain Cook notoriously
resulted from a scientific experiment in theology. 'If he is a god, he
cannot be killed.' So they tried with a dagger, and found that the honest
captain was but a mortal British mariner--no god at all. 'There are
degrees.' Mr. Spencer's men-gods become real gods--after death.[1]

Now the Supreme Being of savage faith, as a rule, never died at all. He
belonged to a world that knew not Death.

One cause of our blindness to the point appears to be this: We have from
childhood been taught that 'God is a Spirit.' We, now, can only conceive
of an eternal being as a 'spirit.' We know that legions of savage gods are
now regarded as spirits. And therefore we have never remarked that there
is no reason why we should take it for granted that the earliest deities
of the earliest men were supposed by them to be 'spirits' at all. These
gods might most judiciously be spoken of, not as 'spirits,' but as
'undefined eternal beings.' To us, such a being is necessarily a spirit,
but he was by no means necessarily so to an early thinker, who may not
yet have reached the conception of a ghost.

A ghost is said, by anthropologists, to have developed into a god. Now,
the very idea of a ghost (apart from a wraith or fetch) implies the
previous _death_ of his proprietor. A ghost is the phantasm of a _dead_
man. But anthropologists continually tell us, with truth, that the idea
of death as a universal ordinance is unknown to the savage. Diseases and
death are things that once did not exist, and that, normally, ought not to
occur, the savage thinks. They are, in his opinion, supernormally caused
by magicians and spirits. Death came into the world by a blunder, an
accident, an error in ritual, a decision of a god who was before Death
was. Scores of myths are told everywhere on this subject.[2]

The savage Supreme Being, with added power, omniscience, and morality, is
the idealisation of the savage, as