DO INTELLECTUAL AND . 



thropologist ought to leave them to others. His duty is to 

 endeavour to put himself outside the narrow circle in which 

 nature has placed him ; to forge t, as much as possible, his in- 

 clinations and personal sentiments; to look around him; to 

 put the world in one view, and to endeavour to be the sole 

 spectator of the same. Then a curious phenomenon will strike 

 his gaze, the chains of mountains and the rivers which sepa- 

 rate the various races of mankind, will also separate different 

 religions. Like the sea which breaks on the shore, every 

 belief has seen its disciples, armed with the sword, or with the 

 pacific weapons of persuasion, stop at certain limits, over 

 which they are not permitted to pass. Of course, we only 

 speak here of true proselytism, of real progress in religion in 

 its form and spirit. Humboldt and Bonpland saw, one day, in 

 the Cordilleras, a savage crowd dancing and brandishing the 

 war-hatchet round an altar where a Franciscan was elevating 

 the Host. Such neophytes are only called Christians in the 

 Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, they are not converts in 

 the opinion of the anthropologist. 



Pure monotheism seems always to have been the religion of 

 the Semitic race. Most European nations, on the contrary, 

 have professed from antiquity, a polytheism or a pantheism, 

 more or less disguised, more or less acknowledged. In fact, 

 by the side of those nations of Asia and Europe, where civili- 

 sation and religious ideas appear to have simultaneously been 

 developed, although in different directions, we find other 

 people who have neither religious ideas, nor gods, nor any 

 kind of worship.* 



Three vast regions of the earth, inhabited by people still in 

 a savage state, appear to have remained, up to the present day, 

 free from religious beliefs ; these are Central Africa, Australia, 

 and the country around the North Pole, that is to say, the 



* [" The natives of Australia," observes Hasskarl, " are deficient in the 

 idea of a Creator or moral Governor of the world, and all attempts to in- 

 struct them terminate in a sudden break up of the conversation. The Be- 

 chuanas, one of the most intelligent tribes of the interior of South Africa, 

 have no idea of a Supreme Being ; and there is no word to be found in their 

 language for the conception of a Creator." (Force and Matter, by Dr. Louis 

 Buchner, transl. and edited by J. F. Collingwood, F.E.S.L., F.G.S., F.A.S.L.). 

 EDITOR.] 



