Excerpt from Primitives and the Supernatural Researches such as these inevitably evoke in the mind vast problems, raised long ago and still vehemently discussed, such as: Have primitives a religion? If so, what? Do they enter tain the idea of a Supreme God? And so forth. These re searches seem indeed to border upon such questions, but they never enter into the discussion. Rightly speaking, they cannot do so, for they are upon another plane altogether. It may possibly be urged that in refusing to pose such prob lems and, as a consequence, to discuss their solution, I am thereby implicitly rejecting certain among them rather than others, and that I thus eliminate them by omission. Not at all. How can I take sides in a debate that I know nothing about? It is not this or that answer to the question that I am avoiding; it is the question itself that I have no right to treat. I could not treat it without abandoning the conception of primitive men tality which I believe to be in conformity with the facts, the method I have followed from the very beginning of these stud ies, and finally, the results which this method has enabled me to Obtain. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.