Chinese pictographs of the dynasty of Shang, second millenium ex., show the Mongolian characteristics of to-day,—almond-shaped almost beardless faces and straight hair; Mit contemporaneous Egyptian hieroglyphic writing is evidence of the modern Western facial traits. A horizontal straight line may be drawn through the eyes that serve as ideographic signs in the West; whereas, in the Far East, such a line is broken into an angle. The inscriptions and carvings on Egyptian temples show that, during the reign of Rameses II, before the Exodus, c. ac. 1250, the negro, the Semite, the Hittite and the Egyptian were types as ethnologically sepa rated from each other as the Iranian, Semitic and African types are distinct to-day. It is only guess-work to conjecture how long it took to evolve these characteristics which distin guished the races ethnologically in the dim past Linguistics throws no more light upon the history of primitive man than does ethnology. So far back as language can be traced, no hint appears of the undoubtedly common original tongue spoken by men. In Mesopotamia, as early as s.c. 4500, the Sumerians spoke a lan guage as much removed from that of their Babylonian conquerors as Hungarian diverges from modern Arabic. The word hand in Sumerian was kola, and the same root is found in Hungarian kart as well as in kindred words of the Lapps and the Finns. Compare with this Sumerian katu its contemporaneous Baby lonian equivalent idu; follow this Semitic root for 7,000 years through Assyrian idu and iadu, Hebrew jad, Aramaic jade, Syriac ida, Arabic jad. The history of these two dissimilar roots, both meaning hand, is evidence of the linguistic evolution of peoples, but leaves us in utter dark ness about the language of primitive man. Here is another linguistic fact that the present writer has discovered The Gros Ventres say itti for woman, and enenya for man. It is strange that the science of language has not yet called attention to the Semitic origin of these forms. Compare the following Semitic words for wo man: Hebrew, ishsha• Aramaic, itto; Syriac, attetha; Assyrian, ishshaau; and for mass: He brew, enosh; Aramaic, mash; Syriac, ssasha; Assyrian, tasks. There must have been Semitic influence in the history of the Gros Ventres. When? During the reign. of Tai-tsong, a.a 627-649, when Nestorian missionaries intro duced Christianity into Mongolia from Persia? Or thousands ofyears before the Christian era? We know not. This much we know, that the science of linguistics, which cannot explain modern facts of diversity and similarity.of Ian guage, is helpless to solve the problem of the primitive civilization of the human race.
As comparative ethnology and linguistics fail to reach back to the primitive racial char acteristics and language of man, so comparative history of religions can prove only two facts about man's primitive beliefs: 1, that no people has been found to be without some cult of a Supreme Power, into a relation of dependence upon which the individual members entered; 2, that the manifold and multiform evolution of natural religion is due to a degeneration from the unity of revelation. It is a false start to assume that the savages of Africa, America and Australia are nearer to primitive religion than are cultured races. There is no reason to think that, for thousands of years, savages have been linguistically, sociologically and the istically at a standstill; and that they bring us back to primitive conditions wherefrom our more civilized races are evolved. Human na tare abhors such a standstill • it either pro gresses or degenerates, and that most of all in its practice of religious worship. Sometimes this degeneration is in both culture and reli gion; at other times it is in religion alone. Instances of degeneration in both culture and religion may be found in out of the way places of the United States. The °Pinies° of the neighborhood of Mount Holly, N. J., are said to belong racially to the same stock as the colonial element of Philadelphia; and yet, because inbreeding and isolation, they have degenerated to the mentality of children and have lost hold of some of the fundamental principles of morality. Instances of degenera
tion from revealed religion alongside of ad vance in culture are provided by Leuba, The Belief in God and Immortality' (1916). His figures shoW that, among the °greater men of science' of the United States, belief in a Per sonal Deity,— that is, worship of a Supreme Personal Power,— is had by only 34 per cent of the physicists, 16 per mit of the biologists, 32 per cent of the historians, 19 per cent of the sociologists and 13 per cent of the psycholo gists. It were just as reasonable to study the religious ideas of these cultured atheists, as to examine into the taboos of savage peoples, in the effort to reach back to the origin of reli gion in the human race.
2. Animism.— What has been said in tht preceding section applies in general to the rationalistic theories on the origin of natural religion. The three chief theories of to-day will now be more specifically set forth. Mir MiS111 is the name given by E. B. Tylor, 'Primi tive Culture' (1903), to the faith of primitive man. His theory is pretty much the same as the °Ghost Theory' of Herbert Spencer, 'Prin ciples of Sociology' (1882) ; it finds the origin of religion in the tendency to endow material objects with living souls, reason, will and the passions. Just as the child door for naughtily jamming its finger, so primitive man took inanimate things as ,possessed by souls. It is not clear that the child is not taught to vent its hurt feelino thus foolishly; nor does history prove that the prehistoric savage, whom ever saw, had a child's mental equip UNTIL Still Mr. Tylor is not proving anything. He is theorizing by the process of progressive assertion. We proceed. Primitive man specu lated on the &fierenees between a living body and a dead one, a man asleep and awake, the human forms seen in time of waking and of dreaming. He concluded that man had a agbost soul,' which left him in sleep for a time and in death forever; and that this °ghost soul' appeared to others in their dreams. The in genious, prehistorical psychologist then spec ulated on his shadow. It followed him every where; was an inseparable companion in hours of consciousness, a very self and yet another self; and thus came to be thought of as an immortal shade. To this °apparitional soul,,' which could take a vacation from the body for a time or forever, physical powers were in due season assigned. At times so great were these powers that the °ghost souls' of certain dead men became gods; in this wise ancestor-worship came into being. Later evolutions resulted from this primitive notion of wandering, separate souls. The next step of the clever, neolithic savage was to evolve souls that never existed in human beings. Everything became animated. In child-life, °chairs, sticks and wooden horses are actuated by the same sort of personal will as nurses and children and kittens. In such matters the savage mind well represents the childish stage' (Tylor, op. cit. I 285). Since these °ghost souls* were out of the ordinary and superhuman, the savage felt their power, invoked their aid, feared their wrath, propitiated them with offerings and finally deified them. It is all very simple to those that have the credulity to swallow Mr. Tylor's dose without making a wry face at the gratuitousness of his whole collection of as sumptions. Against the animistic theory is the fact that ancestor-worship is not an important factor in the religion of many savages. More over, among tribes that worship dead heroes, there is at times found a nature-worship with which no trumped-up °ghost soul' may be as sociated. The pygmies of the Kongo, probably one of the lowest of extant races, worship a Supreme Being and not their dead heroes. And the studies of Andrew Lang, 'The Making of Religion' (1909) have led him to hold the °hypothesis of an early Supreme Being among savages, obscured later by ancestor-worship and ghost-gods, but not often absolutely lost to religious tradition' (p. 289).