dispensable to religion.
But, in the process of animistic development under advancing social
conditions, degeneration was necessarily implied. Degeneration of the
theistic conception for a while, therefore, occurred. The facts are the
proofs; and only contradictory facts, in sufficient quantity, can
annihilate the old theory of Degeneration when it is presented in this
form.

It mast be repeated that on this theory an explanation is given of what
the old Degeneration hypothesis does not explain. Granting a primal
religion relatively pure in its beginnings, why did it degenerate?

Mr. Max Mullet, looking on religion as the development of the sentiment of
the Infinite, regards fetishism as a secondary and comparatively late form
of belief. We find it, he observes, in various forms of Christianity;
Christianity, therefore, is primary there, relic worship is secondary.
Religion beginning, according to him, in the sense of the infinite, as
awakened in man by tall trees, high hills, and so on, it advances to the
infinite of space and sky, and so to the infinitely divine. This is
primary: fetishism is secondary. Arguing elsewhere against this idea, I
have asked: What was the _modus_ of degeneration which produced similar
results in Christianity, and in African and other religions? How did it
work? I am not aware that Mr. Max Mueller has answered this question.
But how degeneration worked--namely, by Animism supplanting Theism--is
conspicuously plain on our theory.

Take the early chapters of Genesis, or any savage cosmogonic myth you
please. Deathless man is face to face with the Creator. He cannot
degenerate in religion. He cannot offer sacrifice, for the Creator
obviously needs nothing, and again, as there is no death, he cannot slay
animals for the Creator. But, in one way or another, usually by breach of
a taboo, Death enters the world. Then comes, by process of evolution,
belief in hungry spirits, belief in spirits who may inhabit stones or
sticks; again there arise priests who know how to propitiate spirits
and how to tempt them into sticks and stones. These arts become lucrative
and are backed by the cleverest men, and by the apparent evidence of
prophecies by convulsionaries. Thus every known kind of degeneration in
religion is inevitably introduced as a result of the theory of Animism. We
do not need an hypothesis of Original Sin as a cause of degeneration, and,
if Mr. Max Mueller's doctrine of the Infinite were _vi