704 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



So, as has often been recounted by travelers amongst wild 

 tribes, a more affectionate and faithful mother, a more 

 thoughtful father, a more considerate chief or brave, as com- 

 pared with others around, might give an upward impetus 

 that was scarcely perceptible, but yet constituted a new pro- 

 environal advance. When such nobler ones died, but yet 

 reappeared in dream to those left behind, an explanation 

 seemed demanded. What more exact scientifically, and nat- 

 ural according to the phenomena, than that the breath, the 

 spirit, the something that had left the dead, should be around 

 them in the sighing wind among the branches. So ancestralism, 

 as it might be termed, constituted the primitive dawning of 

 the religious or spiritic state, or, as Herbert Spencer has phrased 

 it, "the universal first form of religious belief." This also 

 assumed various stages of advance from the crude, almost 

 brutish, regard of man during the palseolithic period, upward 

 to the kinship regard of a Bushman or extinct Tasman, on- 

 ward to the comparatively modern elevated and inspiring 

 ancestralism of the Japanese that has been called Shintoism. 



Reasons for regarding such ancestralism as most primitive 

 in religious evolution are many. Thus those tribes or nations 

 that have been pushed or have migrated furthest from the 

 great Circum-Mediterranean area of keenest competition and 

 advance still retain some form of ancestralism alone, or this 

 as a recognized groundwork upon which a higher belief has 

 been grafted. So the Eskimo and Red Indians, the Fuegian 

 Patagonians, the African Bushmen, the Eastern Nigritos, and 

 the Australians have the slight religious customs they ex- 

 hibit, centered round totem poles or family rites, or the familiar 

 spirits of ancestors. Even the Japanese Shintoism of the 

 first to sixth centuries A. D., that may be regarded as the 

 noblest expression of ancestralism, was fundamentally ances- 

 tralism on which was grafted later a celestial polytheism that 

 almost attained to pure heliotheism, in which, as with the 

 Germans, the sun became not a god, but a ruling goddess. 



Again a considerable body of evidence now exists to show 

 that at the basis of such elaborate polytheistic religions as those 



