acting?" is his sufficient reason, as we have already seen. Not but
what the higher minds amongst savages reflect in their own way upon
the meaning of their customs and rites. But most of this reflection
is no more than an elaborate "justification after the event." The mind
invents what Mr. Kipling would call a "Just-so story" to account for
something already there. How it might have come about, not how it did
come about, is all that the professed explanation amounts to. And when
it comes to choosing amongst mere possibilities, the anthropologist,
instead of consulting the savage, may just as well endeavour to do
it for himself.

Now anthropological theories of the origin of religion seem to me to
go wrong mainly because they seek to simplify too much. Having got
down to what they take to be a root-idea, they straightway proclaim
it _the_ root-idea. I believe that religion has just as few, or as
many, roots as human life and mind.

The theory of the origin of religion that may be said to hold the field,
because it is the view of the greatest of living anthropologists, is
Dr. Tylor's theory of animism. The term animism is derived from the
Latin _anima_, which--like the corresponding word _spiritus_, whence
our "spirit"--signifies the breath, and hence the soul, which
primitive folk tend to identify with the breath. Dr. Tylor's theory
of animism, then, as set forth in his great work, _Primitive Culture_,
is that "the belief in spiritual beings" will do as a definition of
religion taken at its least; which for him means the same thing as
taken at its earliest. Now what is a "spiritual being"? Clearly
everything turns on that. Dr. Tylor's general treatment of the subject
seems to lay most of the emphasis on the phantasm. A phantasm (as the
etymology of the word shows) is essentially an appearance. In a dream
or hallucination one sees figures, more or less dim, but still having
"vaporous materiality." So, too, the shadow is something without body
that one can see; though the breath, except on a frosty day, shows
its subtle but yet sensible nature rather by being felt than by being
seen. Now there can be no doubt that the phantasm plays a considerable
part in primitive religion (as well as in those fancies of the primitive
mind that have never found their way into religion, at all events into
religion as identified with organized cult). Savages see ghosts,
though probably not more frequently than we do; they have vivid dream