[15] The question whether the religious sense exists in the lower animals is discussed by Darwin, Descent of Man (1871), p. 65 ff., 101 f., and others. The question is similar to that respecting conscience; in both cases there is in beasts a germ that appears never to grow beyond a certain point. On the genesis of the moral sense see (besides the works of Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and their successors) G. H. Palmer, The Field of Ethics; L. T. Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution; E. Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas. In regard to religious feeling we observe in certain animals, especially in the domesticated dog, an attitude of dependence and devotion toward the master as a superior Power that is similar to the attitude of man toward a deity, only with more affection and self-surrender. But in the animal, so far as we can judge, the intellectual and ethical conceptions do not come to their full rights—there is no idea of a Power possessing moral qualities and controlling all phenomena. The beast, therefore, is not religious in the proper sense of the term. But between the beast and the first man the difference may have been not great.
[16] The Central Australians, however, have an elaborate marriage law with the simplest political organization and the minimum of religion.
[17] Cf. L. M. Keasbey, in International Monthly, i (1900), 355 ff.; I. King, The Development of Religion, Introduction.
[18] Cf. Tylor, Primitive Culture, chap. xi f.
[19] Beasts, plants, and what we call inanimate objects, also are held, in early stages of civilization, to have souls—a natural inference from the belief that these last are alive and that all things have a nature like that of man.
[20] So Semitic nafs 'soul,' ruh 'spirit'; Sanskrit diman 'soul,' 'self'; Greek psyche, pneuma; Latin anima, spiritus; possibly English ghost (properly gost 'spirit'); and so in many low tribes. See Tylor, Primitive Culture, i, 432 f.; O. Schrader, in Hastings, Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, ii, 15.
[21] The expression 'to receive the last breath' (Æneid, iv, 684 f.), used by us to represent the last pious duty paid to a dying man, was thus originally understood in a strictly literal sense.
[22] So the Delaware Indians (Brinton, The Lenâpé, p. 67).
[23] Cf. the name 'shade' (Greeks, Redmen, and others) for the denizens of the Underworld.
[24] Photographs are now looked on by some half-civilized peoples with suspicion and fear as separate personalities that may be operated on by magical methods. A similar feeling exists in regard to the name of a man or a god—it is held to be somehow identical with the person, and for this reason is often concealed from outsiders.