is side
of savage life, even should the needs be low and material which send
the savage to his god, though his god be a being who in us would
excite the very opposite of reverence, and though his treatment of
his god be far from what to us seems worthy, or even though he strove
to appease a multitude of spirits which he conceived as flitting
about him, before he came to form a settled relation of confidence
with one being whom he took for his own god. Where the sense of need
has sent a human being to hold intercourse with a higher power, there
we hold religion is making its appearance. And if this is universally
the case among men at the savage stage, then religion is universal
among the ancestors of all nations; it did not need to be invented
when kings and priests appeared and wanted it as an instrument for
their own purposes; it was there before there were any kings or
priests, and is an inheritance which has come down to all mankind
from the time when human intelligence first turned to the effort to
understand the world.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED
_For this and the three following chapters_
J. B. Tylor, _Anthropology_, Third Edition, 1891.
J. B. Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, Fourth Edition, 1903.
Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, Third Edition, 1900. A new edition is now
appearing in parts.
A. Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, new edition, 1899.
Th. Achelis, in De la Saussaye.
Waitz und Gerland, _Anthropologie der Naturvoelker_, 1859-72.
Brinton, _Religions of Primitive Peoples_, 1897.
The reports of travellers and missionaries are, of course, important.
CHAPTER III
THE EARLIEST OBJECTS OF WORSHIP
We must now make some attempt to set forth the principal features of
the religion of savages. It is an attempt of some difficulty; for
savage religion is an immense and bewildering jungle of all manner of
extraordinary growths. It is described in detail in large books and
if we try to sum it up in a short statement, we may be told that
essential features have been omitted. No one set of savages has
anything that can be called a system, and different sets of savages
are not alike. For the present purpose we are obliged to include
under the name, tribes who occupy various positions in the scale of
human advancement, and tribes in all sorts of geographical positions,
in hot climates and in cold, both rude savages and those who are
nobler; and these will, of course, have a variety of ideas and needs,
an
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