and consequently universal in the human mind[2]. There is no record of
any nation, however intellectually and morally debased, that has not given
some evidence of a tendency to such belief. The sentiment may be
perverted, the idea may be grossly corrupted, but it is nevertheless
there, and shows the source whence it sprang[3].

Even in the most debased forms of fetichism, where the negro kneels in
reverential awe before the shrine of some uncouth and misshapen idol,
which his own hands, perhaps, have made, the act of adoration, degrading
as the object may be, is nevertheless an acknowledgment of the longing
need of the worshipper to throw himself upon the support of some unknown
power higher than his own sphere. And this unknown power, be it what it
may, is to him a God.[4]

But just as universal has been the belief in the immortality of the soul.
This arises from the same longing in man for the infinite; and although,
like the former doctrine, it has been perverted and corrupted, there
exists among all nations a tendency to its acknowledgment. Every people,
from the remotest times, have wandered involuntarily into the ideal of
another world, and sought to find a place for their departed spirits. The
deification of the dead, man-worship, or hero-worship, the next
development of the religious idea after fetichism, was simply an
acknowledgment of the belief in a future life; for the dead could not have
been deified unless after death they had continued to live. The adoration
of a putrid carcass would have been a form of fetichism lower and more
degrading than any that has been discovered.

But man-worship came after fetichism. It was a higher development of the
religious sentiment, and included a possible hope for, if not a positive
belief in, a future life.