ller arrives at ideas which may be briefly
and broadly stated thus: he inclines to derive religion from man's sense
of the Infinite, as awakened by natural objects calculated to stir that
sense. Our position is, on the other hand, that the germs of the
religious sense in early man are developed, not so much by the vision of
the Infinite, as by the idea of Power. Early religions, in short, are
selfish, not disinterested. The worshipper is not contemplative, so much
as eager to gain something to his advantage. In fetiches, he ignorantly
recognises something that possesses power of an abnormal sort, and the
train of ideas which leads him to believe in and to treasure fetiches is
one among the earliest springs of religious belief.

Mr. Muller's opinion is the very reverse: he believes that a
contemplative and disinterested emotion in the presence of the Infinite,
or of anything that suggests infinitude or is mistaken for the Infinite,
begets human religion, while of this religion fetichism is a later
corruption.

* * * * *

In treating of fetichism Mr. Muller is obliged to criticise the system of
De Brosses, who introduced this rather unfortunate term to science, in an
admirable work, 'Le Culte des Dieux Fetiches' (1760). We call the work
'admirable,' because, considering the contemporary state of knowledge and
speculation, De Brosses's book is brilliant, original, and only now and
then rash or confused. Mr. Muller says that De Brosses 'holds that all
nations had to begin with fetichism, to be followed afterwards by
polytheism and monotheism.' This sentence would lead some readers to
suppose that De Brosses, in his speculations, was looking for the origin
of religion; but, in reality, his work is a mere attempt to explain a
certain element in ancient religion and mythology. De Brosses was well
aware that heathen religions were a complex mass, a concretion of many
materials. He admits the existence of regard for the spirits of the dead
as one factor, he gives Sabaeism a place as another. But what chiefly
puzzles him, and what he chiefly tries to explain, is the worship of odds
and ends of rubbish, and the adoration of animals, mountains, trees, the
sun, and so forth. When he masses all these worships together, and
proposes to call them all Fetichism (a term derived from the Portuguese
word for a talisman), De Brosses is distinctly unscientific. But De
Brosses is distinctly scientific when he attempts to explain