Another assumption underlying the animistic hypothesis, and also
borrowed from Christian teaching, is that the savage regards the soul or
ghost as the liberated and consummated man, and that therefore he will
place God rather in the category of disembodied than of embodied men.
Yet not only the Greek and Roman, but even the Jew, looked on the shade
of the departed as a mere fraction of humanity, as a miserable residue
of man, helpless and hopeless, and withal disposed to be mischievous and
exacting, and therefore needing to be humoured in various ways. Nay,
even Christianity with its dogma of the bodily resurrection, denies that
Platonic doctrine which views the body as the prison rather than as the
complement and consort of the soul; although it holds the soul to be of
an altogether higher, because spiritual, order. But to the primitive
savage, who everywhere regards death as non-natural, as accidental and
violent, the surviving spirit, however uncertain-tempered and
incalculable in its movements, however much to be feared and
propitiated, does not command reverence as a being of a superior order.
At best it is: "Alas! poor ghost!" Better a live dog than a dead lion;
better the meanest slave that draws breath, than the monarch of Orcus.
Surely it is not in the region of shadows that the savage will look for
the great "all-father;" but in the world of solid, tangible realities.
Again, it is assumed that progress in one point is progress in all; that
because we surpass all other races and generations in physical science
and useful arts, we surpass them in every other way; and that they must
be far behind us in ethical and religious conceptions, as they are in
inventions and the production of comforts. To find our own theism and
morality among savages is therefore impossible; for as the crooked stick
is unto the steam-plough, so is the god of the savage unto the God of
Great Britain. Yet when we consider how closely religious and ethical
principles are intertwined, and how glaringly untrue it is to say that
industrial civilization makes for morality,--for purity or self-denial,
or justice, or truth, or honour: how manifestly it is accompanied with a
deterioration of the higher perceptions and tastes, we must surely pause
before taking it for granted that the course of true religion has been
running smoothly parallel to that of commerce.