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instincts in man. Man must either have reasoned out the ideas of Deity, 
and the idea of worship due to Him, or these ideas must have been com- 
municated. The mere study of man’s nature would seem to lead to this 
conclusion. 
The first alternative is that taken by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. 
Frederic Harrison. According to them, man has reasoned out his religion, 
hitherto imperfectly, but yet progressively : according to one, reason will at 
last lead men, as it has already led himself, to the acknowledgment only of 
an unknown eternal energy, from which all things proceed, and far removed 
from any definite acts of worship, shorn of all anthropomorphic surroundings ; 
according to the other, man’s reason will reduce his religion to the worship 
of humanity—whatever that may mean. Of course, these theories cannot 
both be true. The other alternative remains, which is that man is a 
religious being, because the ideas of religion have been communicated to 
him. 
On this part of the question Mr. Eells’s paper is very luminous and 
valuable. However much of the illustrations of belief in spirits or ghosts 
might be taken by Mr. Spencer as contributing to his view, there is one 
part of his theory on which Mr. Eells’s evidence is silent, and that is as to 
the chronological sequence of idea, which is a very vital part of Mr. Spencer’s 
theory. There is no evidence to be obtained from these unwritten traditions 
as to which portion of belief has priority in point of time. There is no 
evidence that the first step in the religions of these Indian tribes was a 
“belief in a double belonging to each individual, which, capable of wan- 
dering away from him during life, becomes his ghost or spirit after death ”; 
that “from this idea of a being eventually distinguished as supernatural 
there develop, in course of time, the ideas of supernatural beings of all orders 
up to the highest”; that from the fact of ‘social grades and rulers of different 
orders,” among men, “ there resulted that conception of a hierarchy of ghosts 
or gods which polytheism shows us ”; and that, “‘with the growth of civili- 
sation and knowledge, the minor supernatural agents became merged in the 
major supernatural agent, this single great supernatural agent gradually 
losing the anthropomorphic attributes at first ascribed.”* ‘The real value 
of Mr. Eells’s investigation seems to lie in the remarkable parallelism, so far 
as traceable, between these traditions and the written records and monu- 
ments of other ancient peoples. The really scientific method of inquiry is 
to ask how the early history of other nations, who have left records of very 
early times, chronologises (if such a word be allowable) these beliefs. And 
such early records certainly indicate belief in one Deity, the Creator, &c., 
as preceding all other beliefs as to spirits, thus entirely reversing the 
chronology of Mr. Spencer’s system. The evidence of these traditions, 
explained by the evidence of actual monuments and records in other parts 
of the world, is that religion is not the result either of instinct or reason, 
* Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1884, p. 838. 
