280 FOSSIL MEN. 



It is further instructive to observe that, except in 

 the more civilized nations, he had not corrupted his 

 faith with the apparatus of complex rituals and idols 

 made with hands. These things in the New World, 

 and no doubt also in the Old, were growths of im- 

 moral and hypocritical civilization. Again, the Ameri- 

 can religion was not materialistic or of the nature of 

 fetichism. Even the rudest tribes were not, like some 

 modern scientists, and perhaps some of the lower 

 Papuan races, " Monists," who cannot conceive any 

 primary existence except material forces brute and 

 inorganic of which man is at once the product and 

 the sport and victim. To arrive at this position 

 requires either the utmost extreme of brutal degrada- 

 tion or of one-sided mental culture. Primitive man 

 was evidently neither in one position nor the other. 

 Neither was he properly pantheistic. He knew that 

 man cannot be God, however much he might believe 

 that there is a likeness between God and man ; and 

 though he might imagine a multitude of spirits con- 

 nected with particular objects and places, yet they 

 were all either ministering spirits of the Great Spirit, 

 or manifestations of that Spirit himself in the things 

 that his power had evolved from old chaos and night ; 

 and all essentially distinct from the objects which 

 were their abodes, or their emblems, or the objects of 

 their care. I by no means desire unduly to exalt pre- 

 historic religions, but I wish distinctly to affirm that 

 they, and what we call the heathenism or animism of 

 untaught tribes, were nearer to God and truth than are 



