creation, and contradictions of our later morality, in the Creator. Israel, none the less, certainly believed in a moral Creator.[1] Why, then, if similar contradictions occur in the beliefs of "men in a rudimentary social condition," should these contradictions militate against my assertion that these men also possess the notion of "a moral, relatively Supreme Being, a Creator"? If the Australians have no such idea because they have myths which contradict it, then Israel, by parity of reasoning, had no such idea. Yet (without discussing the validity of the belief in question) Mr. Hartland will not deny that Israel did possess that belief. How then can he deny that some Australians possess it? That denial he may establish otherwise, but he cannot establish it by adducing any number of contradictory Australian myths. To adduce these, however, is a great part of his criticism of myself. With these contradictory myths I shall deal later. Mr. Hartland states my thesis thus: "He holds that 'all the most backward races historically known to us' had by reasoning arrived at the belief in a moral, eternal, omniscient Creator and Judge" (Folk-Lore, p. 293). I am very much obliged to Mr. Hartland for not saying (like most of my critics) that I attribute the belief to Revelation! In fact I repeatedly declined to give any theory of how the belief arose. I recommend "scientific nescience" (p. 315). The rise of the belief is "a point on which we possess no positive evidence" (p. 293). Mr. Hartland says that I adopt the theory of "reasoning" as the source of the belief, because I say that St. Paul's hypothesis of its rise from the "Argument from Design" "is not the most unsatisfactory." That patronising remark of mine is hardly the statement of a theory. I have stated none; I have declined to state any; but now I will venture on a surmise. The point is really of
- ↑ At how early a date is too wide a question for discussion here. Nor do I ask whether the writer in Genesis consciously put to himself metaphysical questions about matter. Perhaps matter is still non-existent!
