ABSTRACT
T h e r e are no savages in existence to whom the use of implements and the art of making fire are unknown; and vast as is the antiquity of the earliest remains of man, they do not take us back to a time when he was ignorant of the art of making either fire or stone-implements. It is therefore mere matter of speculation whether there ever was such a period of ignorance. It was man’s physical inferiority to his animal competitors in the struggle for existence which made it necessary that he should equip himself with artificial weapons, if he was to survive; and the difficulty of main taining existence under the most favourable natural conditions is so great for the savage even now, when he has fire and tools at his command, that we may imagine he could not, in the beginning, have long survived without them, if at all. But as there must have been one weapon which was the first to be made, one fire which was the first ever kindled, we must either infer that for a time man was without fire and without implements, or else we must assign this discovery to some hypothetical, half-human ancestor of man. Which ever was the case, whether there was ever or never such a period of human ignorance, the object of this chapter is to argue that from the beginning man believed in a supernatural spirit (or spirits) having affinity with his own spirit and having power over him. It is of course only with the existence of this belief that a history of religion has to do. Its validity falls to be discussed by the philosophy of religion.
