Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/559

 Reviews. 5 1 7

" Shadowings, quaint or majestic, of the conception of a Supreme Deity" — these I found almost everywhere, when I was writing Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1887). In my preface of that year I said " the existence — even among savages — of comparatively pure, if inarticulate, religious beliefs or sentiments is insisted on throughout." I was amazed at the nature and amount of the evidence for Mr. Tylor's "shadowings of the conception of a Supreme Deity," among low races who did not possess what Mr. Tylor regards as the upward steps towards that con- ception, the beliefs in "divine manes, local nature gods, great gods of class and element," I found the result without the supposed prior steps towards the result. Therefore, in 1898, I published a too hastily written book, The Making of Religion, (more or less modified in editions of 1900 and 1910), and my conclusion was that the more the beliefs and practices of Animism or ghost worship prevail, the more did the conception of a primal, creative, and ethical and non-animistic superior being fall into the background, till in a few cases there remained of him but nominis umbra, or not even the shadow of a name. Mean- while the evidence for the very wide diffusion of the belief in this being, (who is best called, I think, the All Father, a term em- ployed by Mr. Howitt), has rapidly accumulated. I take up the newest book on a barbaric oceanic people, " The Island of Stone Money," by Dr. W. H. Furness, a son of the great American Shakespearean scholar (Lippincott, 19 10), and I find Yalafath •' the ruler of Heaven," " the supreme deity," high above War and Wind and Dance gods ; and beginning to be, though benignant, "negative rather than positive," though addressed in prayers, (pp. 144, 149-50)-

I said, and I repeat, that the comparative study of religions did so persistently overlook this form of belief that in Professor Huxley's and Mr. Herbert Spencer's works we find no trace of creeds which Mr. Tylor and "/(? vieux Waitz," (as Pere Schmidt writes,) dwelt upon, — Waitz especially in the cases of African and Australian tribes. I tried to call science back to the super- abundant evidence, and Pere Schmidt, in an amusing history of the fortunes of my little book, shews that I piped to " scientists " who declined to dance, — at least on the Continent and in' America.