, 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 Muller
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. Muller 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 Muller 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. Muller 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 command success.