CHAPTEE V. 



RELIGIOUS FEELING IN LOWER MAN. 



AN essential preliminary to a consideration of the question 

 whether the lower animals possess what is entitled to be 

 called or recognised as religious feeling, is a study of what 

 is called the ' religious instinct ' in man ; but not in man 

 of high or the highest religious culture. We must study 

 the religious instinct in its lowest, not its highest mani- 

 festations, in its crude, not cultivated state ; in 



1. The lower or savage races of man 



a. The absence of all religion. 

 &. Rudimentary forms of religion 

 as well as in 



2. The higher or civilised races ; in 



a. Infants and children. 

 6. Idiots and the insane. 



c. The criminal classes. 



d. Buddhists and other classes or races of atheists 



or pantheists. 



Nor are certain considerations, based upon the condition of 

 religion in adults of the educated and moral classes of the 

 most highly civilised nations of the West, altogether irrele- 

 vant. 



In the first place, missionaries and travellers in different 

 parts of the world, and various writers on the natural history 

 of man, tell us that there are, or were, certain savage races 

 utterly devoid of any religious sentiment, sense, idea, wor- 

 ship, or observance. Thus the Uev. William Colenso, of 

 Napier, New Zealand, says of the Maoris, when they wore 

 first visited by Europeans a race with which I have myself 



