The lowest known stage, and, according to the evolutionary hypothesis, the earliest stage in religion, is the belief in the ghosts of the dead, and in no other spiritual entities.  Whether this belief anywhere exists alone, and untempered by higher creeds, is another question.  These ghosts are fed, propitiated, receive worship, and, to put it briefly, the fittest ghosts survive, and become gods.  Meanwhile the conception of ghosts of the dead is more or less consciously extended, so that spirits who never were incarnate as men become credible beings.  They may inform inanimate objects, trees, rivers, fire, clouds, earth, sky, the great natural departments, and thence polytheism results.  There are political processes, the consolidation of a state, for example, which help to blend these gods of various different origins into a divine consistory.  One of these gods, it may be of sky, or air becomes king, and reflection may gradually come to recognise him not only as supreme, but as, theoretically, unique, and thus Zeus, from a very limited monarchy, may rise to solitary all-fatherhood.  Yet Zeus may, originally, have been only the ghost of a dead medicine-man who was called ‘Sky,’ or he may have been the departmental spirit who presided over the sky, or he may have been sky conceived of as a personality, or these different elements may have been mingled in Zeus.  But the whole conception of spirit, in any case, was derived, it is argued, from the conception of ghosts, and that conception may be traced to erroneous savage interpretations of natural and normal facts.

If all this be valid, the idea of God is derived from a savage fallacy, though, of course, it does not follow that an idea is erroneous, because it was attained by mistaken processes and from false premises.  That, however, is the inference which many minds are inclined to draw from the evolutionary hypothesis.  But if the facts on which the savage reasoned are, some of them, rare, abnormal, and not scientifically accepted; if, in short, they are facts demonstrative of unrecognised human faculties, if these faculties raise a presumption that will, mind, and organism are less closely interdependent than science supposes, then the savage reasoning may contain an important element of rejected truth.  It may even seem, at least, conceivable that certain factors in the conception of ‘spirit’ were not necessarily evolved as the anthropological hypothesis conceives them to have been.

Science had scarcely begun her secular conflict with religion, when she discovered that the battle must be fought on haunted ground, on the field of the ghosts of the dead.  ’There are no gods, or only dei otiosi, careless, indolent deities.  There is nothing conscious that survives death, no soul that can exist apart from the fleshly body.’  Such were the doctrines of Epicurus and Lucretius, but to these human nature opposed ‘facts’; we see, people said, men long dead in our dreams,