es at
ideas which may be briefly and broadly stated thus: he inclines to
derive religion from man's sense of the Infinite, as awakened by
natural objects calculated to stir that sense. Our position is, on the
other hand, that the germs of the religious sense in early man are
developed, not so much by the vision of the Infinite, as by the idea
of Power. Early religions, in short, are selfish, not disinterested.
The worshipper is not contemplative, so much as eager to gain
something to his advantage. In fetiches, he ignorantly recognises
something that possesses power of an abnormal sort, and the train of
ideas which leads him to believe in and to treasure fetiches is one
among the earliest springs of religious belief.

Mr. Mueller's opinion is the very reverse: he believes that a
contemplative and disinterested emotion in the presence of the
Infinite, or of anything that suggests infinitude or is mistaken for
the Infinite, begets human religion, while of this religion fetichism
is a later corruption.

* * * * *

In treating of fetichism Mr. Mueller is obliged to criticise the system
of De Brosses, who introduced this rather unfortunate term to science,
in an admirable work, _Le Culte des Dieux Fetiches_ (1760). We call
the work 'admirable,' because, considering the contemporary state of
knowledge and speculation, De Brosses' book is brilliant, original,
and only now and then rash or confused. Mr. Mueller says that De
Brosses 'holds that all nations had to begin with fetichism, to be
followed afterwards by polytheism and monotheism.' This sentence would
lead some readers to suppose that De Brosses, in his speculations, was
looking for the origin of religion; but, in reality, his work is a
mere attempt to explain a certain element in ancient religion and
mythology. De Brosses was well aware that heathen religions were a
complex mass, a concretion of many materials. He admits the existence
of regard for the spirits of the dead as one factor, he gives Sabaeism
a place as another. But what chiefly puzzles him, and what he chiefly
tries to explain, is the worship of odds and ends of rubbish, and the
adoration of animals, mountains, trees, the sun, and so forth. When he
masses all these worships together, and proposes to call them all
Fetichism (a term derived from the Portuguese word for a talisman), De
Brosses is distinctly unscientific. But De Brosses is distinctly
scientific when he attemp