The Ethnology and Climatology of Central Africa, 209 
which is of course the origin of the written character and of 
the possibility of the written literature. Now, without a 
written literature the highest kind of civilisation is impos- 
sible, and there again we see how the Central African has 
been handicapped in the race with the nations of the world. 
Passing on to religion, ethnography knows of no irreligious 
people, or perhaps I should say of no people without a 
religion. We find missionaries returning from Africa and 
telling us that the Africans possess no religion, but what 
could be greater nonsense? They do not possess anything 
approaching the great systematised religions of the world; 
but when we come to understand their ideas, we find that 
they have a religion and are influenced by it; that they live 
up to it, and that they are more consistent in it than the 
majority of those who possess the highest systematic religion 
known. I think it might be possible to prove that the 
religious ideas and beliefs which obtain in Central Africa 
are the result of a retrograde religious movement, such as we 
have exemplified in the Abyssinian or “ Thomas” Christianity, 
or the Mongolian Buddhism; indeed, I cannot help thinking 
that the fetishes of the Negroes, and the belief in spirits of 
the Hottentots, point to this. We know the rapidity with 
which a religion can be propagated; we know also that 
systematic religions may dwindle, droop, and die; even the 
latest example, the change which has taken place only last 
year in the Mormon community, illustrates this sufficiently- 
Religion is bound up most intimately with the deepest needs 
of mankind. It is the result of the need which man feels 
to ascertain the cause of the effects which he perceives in 
his own life and surroundings. The cause of sunshine and 
showers, of growth and decay, of disease and death, and more 
than this, the first cause of everything. This being the 
case, it is only natural that an analogy should be sought by 
men in man for all the workings of Nature; and so we 
find that natural phenomena are supposed to be like men, 
possessed with soul and body, or nephesh and body—nephesh 
meaning the breath of life, that imponderable something 
which is life. So we find the Africans, when speaking of a 
plant which is dead, saying that its spirit or soul is departed, 
