s, the highest element in the religion of the lowest savages does not
appear to be derived from their theory of ghosts. As far as we can say, in
the inevitable absence of historical evidence, the highest gods of savages
may have been believed in, as Makers and Fathers and Lords of an
indeterminate nature, before the savage had developed the idea of souls
out of dreams and phantasms. It is logically conceivable that savages may
have worshipped deities like Baiame and Darumulun before they had evolved
the notion that Tom, Dick, or Harry has a separable soul, capable of
surviving his bodily decease. Deities of the higher sort, by the very
nature of savage reflections on death and on its non-original casual
character, are prior, or may be prior, or cannot be shown not to be prior,
to the ghost theory--the alleged origin of religion. For their evolution
the ghost theory is not logically demanded; they can do without it. Yet
_they_, and not the spirits, bogles, Mrarts, _Brewin_, and so forth, are
the high gods, the gods who have most analogy--as makers, moral guides,
rewarders, and punishers of conduct (though that duty is also occasionally
assumed by ancestral spirits)--with our civilised conception of the
divine. Our conception of God descends not from ghosts, but from the
Supreme Beings of non-ancestor-worshipping peoples.

As it seems impossible to point out any method by which low, chiefless,
non-polytheistic, non-metaphysical savages (if any such there be) evolved
out of ghosts the eternal beings who made the world, and watch over
morality: as the people themselves unanimously distinguish such beings
from ghost-gods, I take it that such beings never were ghosts. In this
case the Animistic theory seems to me to break down completely. Yet these
high gods of low savages preserve from dimmest ages of the meanest culture
the sketch of a God which our highest religious thought can but fill up to
its ideal. Come from what germ he may, Jehovah or Allah does not come from
a ghost.

It may be retorted that this makes no real difference. If savages did not
invent gods in consequence of a fallacious belief in spirit and soul,
still, in some other equally illogical way they came to indulge the
hypothesis that they had a Judge and Father in heaven. But, if the ghost
theory of the high Gods is wrong, as it is conspicuously superfluous, that
_does_ make some difference. It proves that a widely preached scientific
conclusion may be as s