g, cannot be disposed of by the charge that
they think that 'every human being was miraculously endowed' with any
concept whatever. They, at least, will agree with Mr. Max Mueller that
there are fetiches and fetiches, that to one reverence is assigned for
one reason, to another for another. Unfortunately, it is less easy to
admit that Mr. Max Mueller has been happy in his choice of ancient
instances. He writes (p. 99): 'Sometimes a stock or a stone was
worshipped because it was a forsaken altar or an ancient place of
judgment, sometimes because it marked the place of a great battle or a
murder, or the burial of a king.' Here he refers to Pausanias, book i.
28, 5, and viii. 13, 2.[199] In both of these passages, Pausanias, it
is true, mentions stones--in the first passage stones on which men
stood ~hosoi dikas hypechousi kai hoi diokontes~, in the second,
barrows heaped up in honour of men who fell in battle. In neither
case, however, do I find anything to show that the stones were
worshipped. These stones, then, have no more to do with the argument
than the milestones which certainly exist on the Dover road, but which
are not the objects of superstitious reverence. No! the fetich-stones
of Greece were those which occupied the holy of holies of the most
ancient temples, the mysterious fanes within dark cedar or cypress
groves, to which men were hardly admitted. They were the stones and
blocks which bore the names of gods, Hera, or Apollo, names perhaps
given, as De Brosses says, to the old fetichistic objects of worship,
_after_ the anthropomorphic gods entered Hellas. This, at least, is
the natural conclusion from the fact that the Apollo and Hera of
untouched wood or stone were confessedly the _oldest_. Religion,
possessing an old fetich, did not incur the risk of breaking the run
of luck by discarding it, but wisely retained and renamed it. Mr. Max
Mueller says that the unhewn lump may indicate a higher power of
abstraction than the worship paid to the work of Phidias; but in that
case all the savage adorers of rough stones _may_ be in a stage of
more abstract thought than these contemporaries of Phidias who had
such very hard work to make Greek thought abstract.

Mr. Mueller founds a very curious argument on what he calls 'the
ubiquity of fetichism.' Like De Brosses, he compiles (from Pausanias)
a list of the rude stones worshipped by the early Greeks. He mentions
various examples of fetichistic superstitions in Rome