It is not in the plan of our lecture to discuss these momentous questions, or to enter the lists against the representatives of the sciences of Anthropology or Religion. Anthropology is not sufficiently advanced to scatter the mystery that surrounds the cradle of the human race: and it would be rash for the apostles of the other science to maintain that they have succeeded in tracing the lines of that process, out of which Christianity or even Buddhism is alleged to have evolved from the shapeless superstitions of the primitive savage, before they confront us as facts in the history of human thought. Observation and experience alike seem to counsel greater caution in making our deductions and drawing our inferences. Indeed there seems to be almost as much evidence in favour of the theory of degradation as there is in favour of that of evolution. There is no inherent tendency in human society to pass ever on and ever up to something better and nobler. No race, by its own inherent strength, seems to have raised itself from barbarism into anything that can be called true civilisation; but we have abundant proof in the Aztecs of former generations, and the negroes of the Black Republic in the present day, that races can terribly decline. A state of civilisation is very difficult to keep, as well as difficult to gain.[49] And so far as observation goes, savage life and religion appear to be “not the dawning of a society about to rise, but the fading remains of one sinking in storms, overthrown and shattered by overwhelming catastrophes.” Humboldt and Niebuhr, quoted by Whately in his lecture on the Origin of Civilisation, both protest as strongly as he did himself against those who profess to find in the wreck of the civilised and religious man his original representative,[50] and our best authority in the science of religion assures us that Fetichism, far from being the initial of an upward course, marks the very last stage in the downward course of religion.[51] It should content us, in the present state of our knowledge, to find that humanity is capable both of development and degradation. Savagery and civilisation are not separated from each other by impassable barriers: savagery is at least a possibility to a civilised race;[52] civilisation is not beyond the reach of the savage. On the surface of the very highest civilisation many things appear which are also to be seen in the lowest: and just as in the lowest organisms certain rudimentary traces are found of members which are perfected in organisms above them, so the very lowest savagery seems to exhibit an upward tendency. In the same way the very purest religions have clinging to them traces of the lowest superstitions. Not in Buddhism only, but even in Christianity, we find forms of Animism and Fetichism; but the question whether both religions first manifested themselves in these lower forms, with which they are still partly