Page:Native Religions of Mexico and Peru.djvu/28

12 religious development of man has produced myths and mythologies, sacrificial rites and priesthoods, temples, ascetics, gods and goddesses; and on the basis of the Old World's experience we might already feel entitled to say, "Such are the steps and stages of religious evolution; such were the processes of the human spirit before the appearance of the higher religions which are in some sort grafted upon their elder sisters, and have in their turn absorbed or spiritualized them." But there would still be room to ask whether all this development had been natural and spontaneous, whether successive imitations linking one contiguous people to another had not transformed some local and isolated phenomenon into an apparently general and international fact—much as took place with the use of tea or cotton—without our being compelled to recognize any necessary law of human development in it. But what answer is possible to the argument furnished by the discovery of the new planet—I mean to say of America? How can we resist this evidence that the whole organism of mythologies, gods, goddesses, sacrifices, temples and priesthoods, while varying