For the religions developed by the red race, not those mixed creeds learned from foreign invaders, are to be the subjects of our study.

Then will remain the formidable undertaking of reducing the authentic materials thus obtained to system and order, and this not by any preconceived theory of what they ought to conform to, but learning from them the very laws of religious growth they illustrate.

The historian traces the birth of arts, science, and government to man's dependence on nature and his fellows for the means of self-preservation.

Not that man receives these endowments from without, but that the stern step-mother, Nature, forces him by threats and stripes to develop his own inherent faculties.

So with religion: The idea of God does not, and cannot, proceed from the external world, but, nevertheless, it finds its _historical_ origin also in the desperate struggle for life, in the satisfaction of the animal wants and passions, in those vulgar aims and motives which possessed the mind of the primitive man to the exclusion of everything else.
There is an ever present embarrassment in such inquiries.