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evolution. He was thus delightfully accepted by Marx and Engels who made use of his
theory and data in their book, Origins of Private Property and the State.
Shrichakradhar.com
The classical evolutionists, as this school of thought is now called, were trying to
transcend the racial theory that had categorised human beings into higher and lower
species; an assumption totally refuted by Darwin’s theory that had firmly established
Homo sapiens as one unified species with only superficial variations but no integral
differences. The cultural theory of evolution was thus based on the premise that all
humans were capable of attaining the same level of culture but due to some historical
circumstances some of them were arrested in their development and were termed as
‘primitive’, ‘barbarian’ and ‘savages’. But there was always the possibility of giving an
impetus to development that would quickly bring them to the same level of civilisation
as the Europeans. This concept of ‘primitiveness’ as ascribed to the colonised people,
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and the belief that Europe was the pinnacle of ‘civilisation’ became an ideological
justification for colonisation, that was then passed off as a ‘civilising’ process rather than
for what it really was, a process of exploitation and domination.
Tylor argued that people had used religion to explain things that occurred in the world.
He saw that it was important for religions to have the ability to explain why and for what
reason things occurred in the world. For example, God (or the divine) gave us sun to
keep us warm and give us light. Tylor argued that animism is the true natural religion
that is the essence of religion; it answers the questions of which religion came first and
which religion is essentially the most basic and foundation of all religions. For him,
animism was the best answer to these questions, so it must be the true foundation of all
religions. Animism is described as the belief in spirits inhabiting and animating beings,
or souls existing in things. To Tylor, the fact that modern religious practitioners
continued to believe in spirits showed that these people were no more advanced than
primitive societies. For him, this implied that modern religious practitioners do not
understand the ways of the universe and how life truly works because they have
excluded science from their understanding of the world. By excluding scientific
explanation in their understanding of why and how things occur, he asserts modern
religious practitioners are rudimentary. Tylor perceived the modern religious belief in
God as a “survival” of primitive ignorance. However, Tylor did not believe that atheism
was the logical end of cultural and religious development, but instead a highly
minimalist form of monotheist deism. Tylor thus posited an anthropological description
of "the gradual elimination of paganism" and disenchantment, but not secularization.
“Morgan was interested in the evolution of a number of specific things. He listed them
as follows: Subsistence, Government, Language, the Family, Religion, House Life and
Architecture, and Property”. For example, in terms of the evolution of the family, by
examining the Hawaiian society, Morgan anticipated that human beings of the past used
to live in the ‘primitive hoards’ where they used to practice unregulated sexual behavior
and as a result, people could not identify their own fathers (Scupin and DeCorse, 2012;
282). After that there came brother-sister marriage and group marriage in a

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