Beitraege
zur Ethnographie und Sprachenkunde Amerika's_: Leipzig, 1867.

[38-1] _Athapaskische Sprachstamm_, p. 164: Berlin, 1856.

[38-2] Martius, _Von dem Rechtzustande unter den Ureinwohnern
Brasiliens_, p. 77.

CHAPTER II.

THE IDEA OF GOD.

An intuition common to the species.--Words expressing it in
American languages derived either from ideas of above in space, or
of life manifested by breath.--Examples.--No conscious monotheism,
and but little idea of immateriality discoverable.--Still less any
moral dualism of deities, the Great Good Spirit and the Great Bad
Spirit being alike terms and notions of foreign importation.

If we accept the definition that mythology is the idea of God expressed
in symbol, figure, and narrative, and always struggling toward a clearer
utterance, it is well not only to trace this idea in its very earliest
embodiment in language, but also, for the sake of comparison, to ask
what is its latest and most approved expression. The reply to this is
given us by Immanuel Kant. He has shown that our reason, dwelling on the
facts of experience, constantly seeks the principles which connect them
together, and only rests satisfied in the conviction that there is a
highest and first principle which reconciles all their discrepancies and
binds them into one. This he calls the Ideal of Reason. It must be true,
for it is evolved from the laws of reason, our only test of truth.
Furthermore, the sense of personality and the voice of conscience,
analyzed to their sources, can only be explained by the assumption of an
infinite personality and an absolute standard of right. Or, if to some
all this appears but wire-drawn metaphysical subtlety, they are welcome
to the definition of the realist, that the idea of God is the sum of
those intelligent activities which the individual, reasoning from the
analogy of his own actions, imagines to be behind and to bring about
natural phenomena.[44-1] If either of these be correct, it were hard to
conceive how any tribe or even any sane man could be without some notion
of divinity.

Certainly in America no instance of its absence has been discovered.
Obscure, grotesque, unworthy it often was, but everywhere man was
oppressed with a _sensus numinis_, a feeling that invisible, powerful
agencies were at work around him, who, as they willed, could help or
hurt him. In every heart was an altar to the Unknown God. Not that it
was c