religious ideas at all'. But later we hear that they do possess a belief in spirits, and very often better information proves that, in one stage or other of advance or degradation, the theistic conception of a Maker and Judge of the world is also present. Meanwhile even civilised and monotheistic peoples also admit the existence of a world of spirits of the dead, of 'demons' (as in Platonism), of saints (as in Catholicism), of devils, of angels, or of subordinate deities. Thus the elements of religion are universally distributed in all degrees of culture, though one element is more conspicuous in one place or mood, another more conspicuous in another. In one mood the savage, or the civilised man, may be called monotheistic, in another mood atheistic, in a third, practically polytheistic. Only a few men anywhere, and they only when consciously engaged in speculation, assume a really definite and exclusive mental attitude on the subject. The orthodox monotheistic Mussulman has his afreets, and djinns; the Jew, or the Christian, has his angels, the Catholic has his saints; the Platonist has his demons; Superstition has its ghosts. The question is whether all these spiritual beings are only ghosts raised to higher powers: or (in the case of deity), to the highest conceivable power, while, even when this last process has been accomplished, we ask whether other ghosts, on lower grades, continue to be recognised. Meanwhile the whole anthropological hypothesis, whether valid or invalid, lies behind history, behind the experience of even the most backward races at present extant. If it be urged, as by Hume, that the conception of a supreme deity is only a reflection of kingship in human society, we must observe that some monarchical races, like the Aztecs, seem to have possessed no recognised monarchical Zeus; while something very like the monotheistic conception is found among races so remote from the monarchical state of society as to have no obvious distinctions of rank, like the Australian blacks. Moreover the evidence, on such difficult points, is obscure, and fluctuating, and capable of various interpretation. Even among the most backward peoples, the traceable shadow of a monotheistic idea often seems to bear marks of degradation and disuse, rather than of nascent development. There is a God, but He is neglected, and tribal spirits receive prayer and sacrifice. Just as in art there is a point where we find it difficult to decide whether an object is decadent, or archaic, so it is in the study of religious conceptions.
These are a few among the inevitable difficulties and obscurities which haunt the anthropological or evolutionary theory of the origin of religion. Other difficulties meet us at the very beginning. The theory regards gods as merely ghosts or spirits, raised to a higher, or to the highest power. Mankind, according to the system, was inevitably led, by the action of reason upon apparent facts, to endow all things, from
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