The late Mr Andrew Lang was the first seriously to consider the questions involved. His answer, given in _The Making of Religion_ (1898), was twofold. On the one hand, he suggested that “the savage theory of the soul may be based, at least in part, on experiences”--hypnotism, clairvoyance, hallucination, and so forth--“which cannot at present be made to fit into any purely materialistic system of the universe.” On the other hand, he contended that “the idea of God, in its earliest known shape, need not logically be derived from the idea of spirit, however that idea itself may have been attained or {ix} evolved.” In this he was aiming partly at Sir Edward Tylor’s theory of Animism, as developed in the last of his famous chapters on that subject, partly at the theory of the ancient sceptic Euhemerus, revived and championed within recent years by Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen, that gods had been developed out of the ghosts of dead men. He sought to draw a broad distinction between the two concepts, that of a god and that of a spirit of any sort. He claimed that the idea of God was earlier than that of a spirit, and that “a relatively Supreme God,” often expressly described as Creator, existing before death came into the world, and practically eternal, had everywhere preceded the propitiation of the dead. He did not commit himself to any definite opinion as to how this idea of a Supreme God was reached by the rude forefathers of the race. But when he oracularly observed, “The hypothesis of St Paul seems not the most unsatisfactory,” it is no wonder that orthodox readers understood by that expression a primitive revelation, whereas what he meant was the argument from Design as stated in Rom. i. 19, 20. Though Lang’s book, therefore, was hailed as a sign that anthropological science was after all coming round to the support of the old orthodoxy, he himself was too true a sceptic to fall satisfactorily into line. In fact, he solved nothing. The “High Gods” of the lowest savages must have had some origin, must have been evolved out of conceptions lower or more indefinite.