It is twofold. First, the very simple (and therefore, presumably, the very primitive) peoples are precisely those which have, as a rule (not always) the primary conception of a Universal God. That is true of the Pigmies, it is true of certain striking cases in Australasia; it seems less certain of the Esquimaux. Secondly, when you get successive layers of culture, _it is precisely the later layers in which this idea fades away, and local immediate gods begin to obscure it_. The whole process has every appearance of being that of an original concept of a Universal God, later modified by particular tangible relations with immediate things, or, in plain words, Idolatry. You get all the successive stages: The Supreme God still believed in, but regarded as indifferent; the Supreme God half-forgotten; the Supreme God wholly forgotten. They are like geological strata. As an example of the way in which closer examination confirms this succession, I may take the case of the Andaman islanders and those who have observed them. It was at first generally admitted, on the witness of an original observer, that these primitives held the idea of one Universal God. Then came a later observer who made his enquiries and decided that they had no such idea at all. Then came the careful scientific critic of this later observer (Andrew Lang), and showed, to the delight of all those who enjoy the comic, that the _first_ witness spoke the language and lived intimately with the natives for years, while the _second_ was a passing traveller who could not speak a word of it. To all this add a third form of evidence. Primitive man, unless he was quite unlike contemporary savages, and unless his thought did not follow the ordinary rules of thinking, could not possibly turn a local God or deified chieftain or what not into the Universal God. That is a wholly gratuitous assumption born of modern academic speculation. In the actual practice of the mind the two things are quite apart. When a statement is continually repeated and is also simple, it easily comes to be an accepted commonplace. We ought always to test such ambient ideas by close inspection, and this one of many gods coalescing with one God won’t hold water. Our minds do not generalize local attachments: they concentrate them. They may extend the field of operation of such attachments, as when the patriotism of the city is extended to a nation or empire. But they remain fiercely exclusive. There is no “patriotism of the Universe.”