Note 1 — Chapter IV · The Malay Pantheon

“There is nothing that clings longer to a race than the religious faith in which it has been nurtured. Indeed, it is impossible for any mind that is not thoroughly scientific to cast off entirely the religious forms of thought in which it has grown to maturity. Hence in every people that has received the impression of foreign beliefs, we find that the latter do not expel and supersede the older religion, but are engrafted on it, blent with it, or overlie it. Observances are more easily abandoned than ideas, and even when all the external forms of the alien faith have been put on, and few vestiges of the indigenous one remain, the latter still retains its vitality in the mind, and powerfully colours or corrupts the former. The actual religion of a people is thus of great ethnographic interest, and demands a minute and searching observation. No other facts relating to rude tribes are more difficult of ascertainment, or more often elude inquiry.”1