task before him, which, however, he must
undertake, before he can prove zoolatry to be a corruption of
religion.

As to the worship of ancestral and embodied human spirits, which (it
has been so plausibly argued) is the first moment in religion, Mr. Max
Mueller dismisses it, here, in eleven lines and a half. An isolated but
important allusion at the close of his lectures will be noticed in its
place.

The end of the polemic against the primitiveness of fetichism deals
with the question, 'Whence comes the supernatural predicate of the
fetich?' If a negro tells us his fetich is a god, whence got he the
idea of 'god'? Many obvious answers occur. Mr. Mueller says, speaking
of the Indians (p. 205): 'The concept of _gods_ was no doubt growing
up while men were assuming a more and more definite attitude towards
these semi-tangible and intangible objects'--trees, rivers, hills, the
sky, the sun, and so on, which he thinks suggested and developed, by
aid of a kind of awe, the religious feeling of the infinite. We too
would say that, among people who adore fetiches and ghosts, the
concept of gods no doubt silently grew up, as men assumed a more and
more definite attitude towards the tangible and intangible objects
they held sacred. Again, negroes have had the idea of god imported
among them by Christians and Islamites, so that, even if they did not
climb (as De Brosses grants that many of them do) to purer religious
ideas unaided, these ideas are now familiar to them, and may well be
used by them, when they have to explain a fetich to a European. Mr.
Max Mueller explains the origin of religion by a term ('the Infinite')
which, he admits, the early people would not have comprehended. The
negro, if he tells a white man that a fetich is a god, transposes
terms in the same unscientific way. Mr. Mueller asks: 'How do these
people, when they have picked up their stone or their shell, pick up,
at the same time, the concepts of a supernatural power, of spirit, of
god, and of worship paid to some unseen being?' But who says that men
picked up these ideas _at the same time_? These ideas were evolved by
a long, slow, complicated process. It is not at all impossible that
the idea of a kind of 'luck' attached to this or that object, was
evolved by dint of meditating on a mere series of lucky accidents.
Such or such a man, having found such an object, succeeded in hunting,
fishing, or war. By degrees, similar objects might be believed to
co