II. Natural Origins of the Idea of God in the Savage

To declaim against Catholicism as the free thinkers do, or to ignore God as the positivists do does not take account of the persistence of the belief in God in spite of the progress and the popularization of scientific knowledge, nor does it take account of the persistence of Christianity in spite of the railleries of Voltaire, the persecutions of the revolutionists, and the results of exegetic criticism. It is easy to declaim and ignore and it is hard to explain for to do that one must begin by inquiring how and why belief in God and spiritualistic ideas slipped into the human brain, took root there and developed; and answers to these questions are found only by going back to the ideology of the savages, where are clearly outlined the spiritualistic ideas which encumber the brains of civilized people.

The idea of the soul and of its survival is an invention of the savages, who allowed them selves an immaterial and immortal spirit to explain the phenomena of dreams.

The savage who has no doubt of the reality of his dreams imagines that if during his sleep he hunts, fights, or takes vengeance, and if on awakening he finds himself in the place where he lay down it is because another self, a double, as he says, impalpable, invisible and light as air has left his sleeping body to go far away to hunt or fight, and if it comes about that he sees in his dreams his ancestors and his dead companions he concludes that he has been visited by their spirits, which survive the destruction of their corpses.

The savage – “that child of the human species,” as Vico calls him – has, like the child, puerile notions about nature. He thinks that he can give orders to the elements as to his limbs, that he can with words and magic rites command the rain to fall, the wind to blow, etc.; if for example he fears that the night may overtake him on his march he knots up in a certain fashion certain herbs to stop the sun, as the Joshua of the Bible did with a prayer. The spirits of the dead having this power over the elements to a higher degree than the living, he calls on them to produce the phenomenon when he fails in bringing it about. Since a brave warrior and a skillful sorcerer have more effect upon nature than simple mortals, their spirits when they are dead must consequently have a greater power over it than the doubles of ordinary men; the savage chooses them out of the crowd of spirits to honor them with offerings and sacrifices and to beg them to make it rain, when drought compromises his harvests, to give him victory when he takes the field, to cure him when he is sick. Primitive man starting out with a mistaken explanation of dreams elaborated the elements which later served for the creation of one sole God, who is when defined nothing more than a spirit, more powerful than the other spirits.

The idea of God is neither an innate idea, nor an a priori idea, but an a posteriori idea, just as all ideas are, since man can not think until he has come in contact with the phenomena of the real world which he explains as he can. It is impossible to set forth in an article the logically deductive manner in which the idea of God proceeded from the idea of the soul, invented by the savages.

Grant Allen, bringing together and summing up the observations and researches of explorers, folklorists, and anthropologists and interpreting them and illuminating them by his ingenious and fertile criticism has followed out in its principal steps the process of formation of the idea of God in his remarkable work entitled, The Evolution of the Idea of God; an Enquiry into the Origin of Religions, London 1903. He also demonstrated with ample proofs that primitive Christianity with its Man-God, dead and raised again, its Virgin-Mother, its Holy-Spirit, its legends, its mysteries, its dogmas, its ethics, its miracles, and its ceremonies, merely assembled and organized into a religion, certain ideas and myths, which for centuries were cur rent in the ancient world.