Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 20, 2025
Spencer, then, rather heedlessly, though correctly, argues that 'nomadic habits are unfavourable to evolution of the ghost-theory. Alas, this gives away the whole case! For, if all men began as nomads, and nomadic habits are unfavourable even to the ordinary ghost, how did the Australian and other nomads develop the Supreme Being, who, ex hypothesi, is the final fruit of the ghost-flower?
They will appear yet more futile to any student who goes so far with me as to doubt whether the highest gods of the lowest races could be developed, or can be shown to have been developed, by way of the ghost-theory. To him who reaches this point the whole animistic doctrine of ghosts as the one germ of religion will appear to be imperilled.
By his very nature, man must clothe all gods with some human passions and attributes, unless, like a large number of savages, he leaves his high God severely alone, and is the slave of fetishes and spectres. But that practice makes against the ghost-theory. In the attempt to account thus, namely by transference, for the sacrifices to Jehovah, we are met by a difficulty of our own making.
They could have been conceived of, in the nature of the case, by a race of immortals who never dreamed of such a thing as a ghost. For these gods, the ghost-theory is not required, and is superfluous, even contradictory. Baiame, Cagn, Bunjil, in their adorers' belief, were there; death later intruded among men, but did not affect these divine beings in any way.
The fundamental conditions of the highest social development is the cessation of war. The ideas and sentiments at the basis of Ecclesiastical Institutions have been naturally derived from the ghost-theory already described.
The ghost-theory, therefore, by the evidence of anthropology itself, is not needed for the evolution of the high gods of savages. It is only needed for the evolution of ghost-propitiation and genuine dead-ancestor worship. Therefore, the high gods described were not necessarily once ghosts were not idealised mortal ancestors.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking