The way was thus cleared for a really scientific enquiry into the beginnings of religion. No longer were we hampered with the story of Genesis and the primitive revelation. Our vision was not to be bounded by the Aryan and Semitic peoples. The guesswork of the philological school was at an end, and ritual was admitted {viii} to be at least as indispensable to the enquiry as story and belief. Professor Tylor had already done something more than pioneer work in the chapters on Mythology and Animism in _Primitive Culture_. In the chapters on Animism in particular he had exhibited the universal belief in the souls, not merely of human beings, but of other animate, and even of inanimate, creatures. He had boldly discussed the relation of this belief to the doctrine of spirits generally, and considered the transitional series of ideas through the cult of the dead, possession, fetishism, idol-worship, and the beliefs of the Christian Fathers. It became evident that a doctrine so complex and subtle, even in its simpler manifestations, could not bean original and innate belief of the human mind, but that it must have been evolved from something simpler, perhaps vaguer, certainly more comprehensive. “A theoretical conception of primitive philosophy, designed to account for phenomena now classed under Biology, especially Life and Death, Health and Disease, Sleep and Dreams, Trance and Visions” pre-supposes a long period of observation, comparison and discussion, during which the ideas slowly took shape and ranged themselves round a central theory.