in presence of the hills, the stars, the
sea, is developed. Mr. Max Mueller cuts the matter shorter. The early
inhabitants of the earth saw a river, and the 'mere sight' of the
torrent called forth the feelings which (to us) seem to demand ages of
the operation of causes disregarded by Mr. Mueller in his account of
the origin of Indian religion.

The mainspring of Mr. Mueller's doctrine is his theory about
'apprehending the infinite.' Early religion, or at least that of
India, was, in his view, the extension of an idea of Vastness, a
disinterested emotion of awe.[202] Elsewhere, we think, early religion
has been a development of ideas of Force, an interested search, not
for something wide and far and hard to conceive, but for something
practically _strong_ for good and evil. Mr. Mueller (taking no count in
this place of fetiches, ghosts, dreams and magic) explains that the
sense of 'wonderment' was wakened by objects only semi-tangible,
trees, which are _taller_ than we are, 'whose roots are beyond our
reach, and which have a kind of life in them.' 'We are dealing with a
quartenary, it may be a tertiary troglodyte,' says Mr. Mueller. If a
tertiary troglodyte was like a modern Andaman Islander, a Kaneka, a
Dieyrie, would he stand and meditate in awe on the fact that a tree
was taller than he, or had 'a kind of life,' 'an unknown and
unknowable, yet undeniable something'?[203] Why, this is the sentiment
of modern Germany, and perhaps of the Indian sages of a cultivated
period! A troglodyte would look for a 'possum in the tree, he would
tap the trunk for honey, he would poke about in the bark after grubs,
or he would worship anything odd in the branches. Is Mr. Mueller not
unconsciously transporting a kind of modern malady of thought into
the midst of people who wanted to find a dinner, and who might worship
a tree if it had a grotesque shape, that, for them, had a magical
meaning, or if _boilyas_ lived in its boughs, but whose practical way
of dealing with the problem of its life was to burn it round the stem,
chop the charred wood with stone axes, and use the bark, branches, and
leaves as they happened to come handy?

Mr. Mueller has a long list of semi-tangible objects 'overwhelming and
overawing,' like the tree. There are mountains, where 'even a stout
heart shivers before the real presence of the _infinite_'; there are
rivers, those instruments of so sudden a religious awakening; there is
earth. These supply the ma