(4) Many persons have observed with surprise the apparition in young children of the problem of creation. A child notices a curiously-shaped stone, and asks who made it. He is told that it was formed in the stream by the water. Then, suddenly, he throws out, in quick succession, questions that are as much exclamations of astonishment as queries, 'Who made the stream, who the mountain, who the earth?' _The necessity of a Maker is, no doubt, borne in upon the savage at a very early time_, not upon every member of a tribe, but upon some peculiarly gifted individual, who imparts to his fellows the awe-striking idea of a mysterious, all-powerful Creator. The form under which the Creator is imagined is, of course, derived from the beings with which his senses have made the savage familiar.
In what chronological order did the three kinds of unseen beings appear? Which was first: ghosts, nature-beings, or creator? Our present knowledge does not provide an answer to this query. But this one may venture to affirm: they need not have appeared in the same order everywhere. It is conceivable that among certain groups of men the idea of a creator first attained clearness and influence, while elsewhere the idea of ghosts implanted itself before the others.
A question of greater importance to the student of the origin of Religion is that of the lineage of the first god or gods, _i.e._ of the first unseen, personal agents with whom men entered into relations definite and influential enough to deserve the name Religion. Are they descended from ghosts, or are they nature-beings, or creators? I say, 'descended' from ghosts, for ghosts have not, originally, all the qualities required of a divinity. They are at first hardly greater than men, though somewhat different. They must be magnified and differentiated from human beings if they are to generate the religious attitude. A comparison of the double-source of the ghost-belief with the source of the belief in nature-beings suggests the following remarks. Phenomena belonging to classes one and two necessarily lead to a belief in unseen _man-like_ beings. The familiar relation of ghosts with the tribe, and also the great number of them, offer a definite resistance to the process of deification. It is otherwise with the personified nature-powers, for they are not necessarily, like ghosts, mere dead men in another life. In conceiving of an agent animating nature, the imagination is not limited to the thought of a particular human being, not even of a human being at all. The thunder might be the voice of some monstrous animal. The surpassing variety, the magnitude and magnificence of nature, stimulate the imagination into more original activity than the apparitions of men and women in dreams or in trances. For these reasons, if the choice was between ghosts and nature-beings, it would be advisable to favour the hypothesis that the first gods were derived from the spontaneous personification of striking natural events. But the idea of a creator must take precedence of ghosts and nature-beings in the making of Religion, for a world-creator possesses from the first the greatness necessary to the object of a cult, and the creature who recognises a creator can hardly fail to feel his relationship to him. A Maker cannot, moreover, be an enemy to those who issue from him, but must, it seems, appear as the Great Ancestor, benevolently inclined towards his offspring. Incomparable greatness, creative power, benevolence, are as many attributes favourable to the appearance of a Religion in the high sense which, as we shall see, W. Robertson Smith gives to the word.