General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1884 Original Publisher: Trbner Subjects: Religions History / General Religion / General Religion / Comparative Religion Religion / History Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: 11. The question of the relation in which the religions of savages stand to the great historic families of religions, has only just been opened; and not till it has been solved with some degree of certainty, will it be possible for the separate nature-religions to take their proper places in the history of religion. At present they only serve to give some idea of the religions which preceded those of civilised nations, and their description does not belong to this place. But while animistic religion is, in its nature, and even in its ideas and usages, with slight modification everywhere the same, it is necessary to point out the special causes which have led to its development among different races in such different forms and degrees. Of these the principal are (i) the different characters of these races, (2) the nature of their home and occupations, and (3) the historic relations in which some of them stood to their neighbours. The question of the relation of the religions of savages to those of the great historic families of religions, amounts briefly to this: – Are the former entirely independent, or is there reason for regarding them as the backward and imperfectly-developed members of larger groups, to which the recognised families of religion (such as the Semitic or Indo-Germanic) belong ? There is real agreement between the civilisation and religion of the Negroes, and those of the Egyptians. Similar correspondences exist between the Eed Indians and Turani…