ts to explain the animal-worship of Egypt,
and the respect paid by Greeks and Romans to shapeless stones, as
survivals of older savage practices.

The position of De Brosses is this: Old mythology and religion are a
tissue of many threads. Sabaeism, adoration of the dead, mythopoeic
fancy, have their part in the fabric. Among many African tribes, a
form of theism, Islamite, or Christian, or self-developed, is
superimposed on a mass of earlier superstitions. Among these
superstitions, is the worship of animals and plants, and the cult of
rough stones and of odds and ends of matter. What is the origin of
this element, so prominent in the religion of Egypt, and present, if
less conspicuous, in the most ancient temples of Greece? It is the
survival, answers De Brosses, of ancient practices like those of
untutored peoples, as Brazilians, Samoyeds, Negroes, whom the
Egyptians and Pelasgians once resembled in lack of culture.

This, briefly stated, is the hypothesis of De Brosses. If he had
possessed our wider information, he would have known that, among
savage races, the worships of the stars, of the dead, and of plants
and animals, are interlaced by the strange metaphysical processes of
wild men. He would, perhaps, have kept the supernatural element in
magical stones, feathers, shells, and so on, apart from the triple
thread of Sabaeism, ghost-worship, and totemism, with its later
development into the regular worship of plants and animals. It must be
recognised, however, that De Brosses was perfectly well aware of the
confused and manifold character of early religion. He had a clear view
of the truth that what the religious instinct has once grasped, it
does not, as a rule, abandon, but subordinates or disguises, when it
reaches higher ideas. And he avers, again and again, that men laid
hold of the coarser and more material objects of worship, while they
themselves were coarse and dull, and that, as civilisation advanced,
they, as a rule, subordinated and disguised the ruder factors in their
system. Here it is that Mr. Max Mueller differs from De Brosses. He
holds that the adoration of stones, feathers, shells, and (as I
understand him) the worship of animals are, even among the races of
Africa, a corruption of an earlier and purer religion, a 'parasitical
development' of religion.

However, Mr. Max Mueller himself held 'for a long time' what he calls
'De Brosses' theory of fetichism.' What made him throw the theory
over