Note 13.1 — The Evolution of Religion

We realise the gain of this: we are slowly and surely arriving at inductive conclusions concerning the similarity of development through which the higher and lower races have passed and are passing; the solidarity of the human family appears stronger than we might have supposed. At the same time we have now to be on our guard against certain common anthropological fallacies. Some of these are less inevitable than others: for instance, that which we may call the fallacy of simple enumeration. On the ground of the general inductive belief that the higher races have at one time passed through a savage phase, it is often too rashly assumed that each and all of them must at one time have possessed a particular institution, such as totemism or ancestor-worship, which, as a matter of fact, is found among the majority of the savage races of to-day. This is to exaggerate the principle of solidarity, to ignore the fact of the great diversity actually observable among existing primitive societies, and the possibility that it was just by avoiding some particular detrimental institution that some of the higher peoples were able to proceed on their path of progress. Again, the anthropological explanation is often obliged to be hypothetical, for the evidence presented is often very fragmentary: by means of a reasonable and expert imagination, an attempt is made to reconstruct a whole fabric out of a few fragments. A single bone may enable the expert biologist to reshape unerringly the once living animal; but in anthropology the fragment in question may have descended from either one of two differing organisms or organic institutions that may have left very much the same imprint upon mythology and religion. For instance, a full-fledged totemistic system, having fallen into decay, might leave its trace in certain stories about animals or in occasional reverence paid to a particular animal: but direct animal-worship, a religious view that may be quite independent of totemism, or certain forms of ancestor-worship may equally well have deposited the same fossil-thought or fossil-rite.13.1 And we know how recklessly the theory of the ubiquitous practice of human sacrifice has been used to explain certain peculiar phenomena in later ritual, such as the scourging of the Spartan boys, for example.