gun. Worship lends
to these powers, though they were known before, a fixity and reality
they did not formerly possess. Von Hartmann is inclined to trace all
the various worships of these powers, which have prevailed in the
most different parts of the earth, to the same original centre, while
at the same time he maintains that even if all the instances of this
worship cannot be referred to any common origin, it must have arisen
in this way, wherever men of the same nature dwelt; the psychological
necessity of this development accounts for the appearance of this
same religion in different lands and among dissimilar races.

The worship of the heavenly powers, accordingly, is with this writer
the original religion. While admitting that the worship of domestic
spirits grew up in the way described by the English anthropologists,
he denies that Animism is ever a religion by itself without being
combined with higher beliefs. He denies also that fetishism could
ever be an original religious product, or that men could ever pass
from having no religion to the religion of fetishism. Wherever it
appears, it is a religion of decay. All the religion in the world has
come from the worship of nature, which, whether arising at one centre
or at several, spread over the world, and is to be recognised,
clearly or dimly, in the religions of all lands.

This view of the origin of religion is shared in the main by Otto
Pfleiderer,[6] and other German writers. It was from the impressions
made on man by the powers of nature, these scholars hold, and not
from his belief in spirits, that his religion came. But it was not
necessarily due to pure egoism, as Von Hartmann represents; the
earliest religions need not, they hold, have been a mere attempt at
bribery. The motives which first caused man to worship the heavenly
powers surely arose from other needs than that for food alone. The
intellectual craving, the desire to know the nature of the world he
lived in, and to refer himself to the highest principle of it, as far
as that could be attained; the aesthetic need, the desire to have to
do with objects which filled his imagination; the moral need, the
desire not to occupy a purely isolated position, but to place himself
under some authority, and to feel some obligation, these also, though
in the dimmest way, as matters of presentiment rather than clear
consciousness, entered into the earliest worship of the heavenly
powers. This view has the grea