instances of degeneration. But a multitude of
savage tribes remain in all quarters of the globe who do not appear
to have been thus enfeebled, and who are held to be still in that
state in which the dwellers in all parts of the earth were before
what we now call civilisation began. They are races among whom
civilisation did not spring up, as it did in China or in Peru. From
these races we may learn in a general way, though in this great
caution is required, what the ancestors of all the civilised nations
were. It confirms this conclusion that we find in every civilised
nation a number of phenomena, practices, beliefs, stories, which the
mental condition of the nation as we know it does not account for,
which manifestly are not outgrowths of the civilisation, but relics
of an older state of life, which civilisation has not entirely
obliterated; and that these practices, beliefs, and stories can be
exactly matched by those of the savage races. The inference is drawn
that civilisation has sprung from savage life, that, as Mr. Tylor
says, "the savage state represents the early condition of mankind,
out of which the higher culture has gradually been developed by
causes still in operation." To trace the history of civilisation,
therefore, it is necessary to go back to the earliest knowledge we
have of human life upon the earth, and to ask what germs and
rudiments can be discovered among savages of law, of institutions, of
arts and sciences. Such works as Maine's _Ancient Law_, Tylor's
_Primitive Culture_, Lubbock's _Origin of Civilisation_, show how
fruitful this method is, and what floods of light it pours on the
history of society.

[Footnote 1: Instances in Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, chap. ii.,
where the theory of degeneration is fully discussed.]

Now what is true of civilisation generally will be true also of
religion, which is one of its principal elements. If every country
was once inhabited by savages, then the original religion of every
country must have been a religion of savages; and in the later
religion there will be features which have been carried on from the
earlier one. This, indeed, we must in any case expect to find. No new
religion can enter on its career on a soil quite unprepared, on which
no gods have been worshipped before. (That would imply that there had
been races in the world without religion, on which we shall speak
presently.) A new faith has always to begin by adjusting itself to
that which