This apophthegm embodies a dogma somewhat too rash and sweeping. The necessity of a Demiurgos--a Creator--so familiar to our minds is generally strange to savages. The wilder tribes of Singhalese Veddahs, for instance, have no superstition; these savages have not even attained the fear of demons. It has but scant hold upon the imagination of barbarous men. The Buddhists and Jains ascribed after Sakya-Muni the phenomena of the universe to Swabháva, or force inherent in matter, Matra, and independent of an Ishwara-Karta, or Manufacturing God. Aristotle and Spinoza believed with Pythagoras the world to be eternal, and that a God cannot exist without the world, as height without breadth. Hence Hegel’s “eternal nihilum”--creation being everything for created beings--in direct opposition to Calvin, who opined that creation is not a transfusion of essence, but a commencement of it out of nothing. In the present day, the Kafirs of the Cape, the ancient Egyptians, and African races generally, barbarians and semi-barbarians, by no means deficient in intellect and acuteness, have never been able to comprehend the existence or the necessity of a One God. With them, as with a multitude of civilized philosophers--the Indian Charvakas, for instance--Nature is self-existent, Matter is beginningless and endless; in fact, the world is their God. _Ex nihilo nihil fit_ is the first article of their creed. Absolute ignorance of any God, then, was the earliest spiritual condition of the human family. But veneration is inherent in the human breast. Presently mankind, emerging from intellectual infancy, began to detect absurdity in creation without a Creator, in effects without causes. As yet, however, they did not dare to throw upon a Single Being the whole onus of the world of matter, creation, preservation, and destruction. Man, instinctively impressed by a sense of his own unworthiness, would hopelessly have attempted to conceive the idea of a purely Spiritual Being, omnipotent and omnipresent. Awestruck by the admirable phenomena and the stupendous powers of Nature, filled with a sentiment of individual weakness, he abandoned himself to a flood of superstitious fears, and prostrated himself before natural objects, inanimate as well as animate. Thus comforted by the sun and fire, benefited by wind and rain, improved by hero and sage, destroyed by wild beasts, dispersed by convulsions of Nature, he fell into a rude, degrading, and cowardly Fetissism, the faith of fear, and the transition state from utter savagery to barbarism.