intertwisted with the earliest and most
widespread law of prohibited degrees. How did the Hindoos dispense
with the aid of these superstitions? Well, they did not quite dispense
with them. Mr. Max Mueller remarks, almost on his last page (376), that
'in India also ... the thoughts and feelings about those whom death
had separated from us for a time, supplied some of the earliest and
most important elements of religion.' If this was the case, surely the
presence of those elements and their influence should have been
indicated along with the remarks about the awfulness of trees and the
suggestiveness of rivers. Is nothing said about the spirits of the
dead and their cult in the Vedas? Much is said, of course. But, were
it otherwise, then other elements of savage religion may also have
been neglected there, and it will be impossible to argue that
fetichism did not exist because it is not mentioned. It will also be
impossible to admit that the _Hibbert Lectures_ give more than a
one-sided account of the Origin of Indian Religion.

The perusal of Mr. Max Mueller's book deeply impresses one with the
necessity of studying early religions and early societies
simultaneously. If it be true that early Indian religion lacked
precisely those superstitions, so childish, so grotesque, and yet so
useful, which we find at work in contemporary tribes, and which we
read of in history, the discovery is even more remarkable and
important than the author of the _Hibbert Lectures_ seems to suppose.
It is scarcely necessary to repeat that the negative evidence of the
Vedas, the religious utterances of sages, made in a time of what we
might call 'heroic culture,' can never disprove the existence of
superstitions which, if current in the former experience of the race,
the hymnists, as Barth observes, would intentionally ignore. Our
object has been to defend the 'primitiveness of fetichism.' By this we
do not mean to express any opinion as to whether fetichism (in the
strictest sense of the word) was or was not earlier than totemism,
than the worship of the dead, or than the involuntary sense of awe and
terror with which certain vast phenomena may have affected the
earliest men. We only claim for the powerful and ubiquitous practices
of fetichism a place _among_ the early elements of religion, and
insist that what is so universal has not yet been shown to be 'a
corruption' of something older and purer.

One remark of Mr. Max Mueller's fortifie