. He detects the
fetichism of popular Catholicism, and of Russian orthodoxy among the
peasants. Here, he cries, in religions the history of which is known
to us, fetichism is secondary, 'and why should fetiches in Africa,
where we do not know the earlier development of religion, be
considered as primary?' What a singular argument! According to
Pausanias, this fetichism (if fetichism it is) _was_ primary, in
Greece. The _oldest_ temples, in their holiest place, held the oldest
fetich. In Rome, it is at least probable that fetichism, as in Greece,
was partly a survival, partly a new growth from the primal root of
human superstitions. As to Catholicism, the records of Councils, the
invectives of the Church, show us that, from the beginning, the
secondary religion in point of time, the religion of the Church,
laboured vainly to suppress, and had in part to tolerate, the primary
religion of childish superstitions. The documents are before the
world. As to the Russians, the history of their conversion is pretty
well known. Jaroslaf, or Vladimir, or some other evangelist, had whole
villages baptised in groups, and the pagan peasants naturally kept up
their primary semi-savage ways of thought and worship, under the
secondary varnish of orthodoxy. In all Mr. Max Mueller's examples,
then, fetichism turns out to be _primary_ in point of time;
_secondary_ only, as subordinate to some later development of faith,
or to some lately superimposed religion. Accepting his statement that
fetichism is ubiquitous, we have the most powerful _a priori_ argument
that fetichism is primitive. As religions become developed they are
differentiated; it is only fetichism that you find the same
everywhere. Thus the bow and arrow have a wide range of distribution:
the musket, one not so wide; the Martini-Henry rifle, a still narrower
range: it is the primitive stone weapons that are ubiquitous, that are
found in the soil of England, Egypt, America, France, Greece, as in
the hands of Dieyries and Admiralty Islanders. And just as rough stone
knives are earlier than iron ones (though the same race often uses
both), so fetichism is more primitive than higher and purer faiths,
though the same race often combines fetichism and theism. No one will
doubt the truth of this where weapons are concerned; but Mr. Max
Mueller will not look at religion in this way.

Mr. Max Mueller's remarks on 'Zoolatry,' as De Brosses calls it, or
animal-worship, require only the