much in contact with
Europeans.

Supposing that the arguments in this essay met with some acceptance, what
effect would they have, if any, on our thoughts about religion? What is
their practical tendency? The least dubious effect would be, I hope, to
prevent us from accepting the anthropological theory of religion, or any
other theory, as a foregone conclusion, I have tried to show how dim is
our knowledge, how weak, often, is our evidence, and that, finding among
the lowest savages all the elements of all religions already developed
in different degrees, we cannot, historically, say that one is earlier
than another. This point of priority we can never historically settle. If
we met savages with ghosts and no gods, we could not be sure but that they
once possessed a God, and forgot him. If we met savages with a God and no
ghosts, we could not be historically certain that a higher had not
obliterated a lower creed. For these reasons dogmatic decisions about the
_origin_ of religion seem unworthy of science. They will appear yet more
futile to any student who goes so far with me as to doubt whether the
highest gods of the lowest races could be developed, or can be shown to
have been developed, by way of the ghost-theory. To him who reaches this
point the whole animistic doctrine of ghosts as the one germ of religion
will appear to be imperilled. The main practical result, then, will be
hesitation about accepting the latest scientific opinion, even when backed
by great names, and published in little primers.

On the hypothesis here offered to criticism there are two chief sources of
Religion, (1) the belief, how attained we know not,[10] in a powerful,
moral, eternal, omniscient Father and Judge of men; (2) the belief
(probably developed out of experiences normal and supernormal) in
somewhat of man which may survive the grave. This second belief is not,
logically, needed as given material for the first, in its apparently
earliest form. It may, for all we know, be the later of the two beliefs,
chronologically. But this belief, too, was necessary to religion; first,
as finally supplying a formula by which advancing intellects could
conceive of the Mighty Being involved in the former creed; next, as
elevating man's conception of his own nature. By the second belief he
becomes the child of the God in whom, perhaps, he already trusted, and in
whom he has his being, a being not destined to perish with the death of
the body. Ma