Note 46 — Chapter VII · FALLACIES IN POPULAR ARGUMENTS

Andrew Lang (in the third chapter of his book, Magic and Religion) instances Australian tribes, and says: “Nobody dreams of propitiating gods or spirits by prayer [compare Bishop Ingram’s statement that man is a praying animal!] while magic is universally practised.” There is, as Mr. Lang observes, “no room for a God, nor for an idea of a future life, except the life of successive re-incarnations.” “I do not think,” writes46 Professor Baldwin Spencer, “that there is really any direct evidence of any Australian native belief in a ‘Supreme Being’ in our sense of the term.”