f worship man fixes his attention on one
object only. That belongs to the very nature of religion; as a child
could not treat several men at once as its father, nor a servant be
equally faithful to several masters, so man naturally tends to have
one god. He turns to the highest he knows, who is most likely to be
able to help him, and there cannot be two highests, but only one. But
man's position in the early world does not allow him to be true to
this religious instinct. As he sees one aspect of the world to-day,
and another to-morrow, he cannot, when his god is a power of nature,
always see the same god before him. But can he not worship another
god when the first one is out of sight and out of mind? Though he
worshipped heaven yesterday, can he not worship the sun to-day, or
the storm, or the great sea? And though the former generation
worshipped one of these beings in the foremost place, may not the
existing generation devote itself principally to another? That power
does not cease to be a deity which is not immediately before his
mind. It is still a deity, and in a while he will turn to it again,
and make it first. Thus it comes about by inevitable logic that when
man gets his gods from nature, he has a number of them. When he gets
a new god he does not deny the god he had before; he is not yet in a
position to conclude that there can only be one god. When he is
worshipping he feels as if there were only one; but this feeling
applies at different times to a number of different beings, and from
such inconsistency he lacks the power to free himself. The other is a
god too; all the gods he has ever worshipped he may on occasion
worship again. Nor can he refuse to recognise the gods of others; to
them no doubt they are gods, if not to him; they are beings of the
same class with his god. And thus early man is a polytheist.
Polytheism is a complex product; it is the addition to each other of
a number of cults which have grown up separately.

In Polytheism, however, very different religious positions are
possible. Men may feel that the whole set of the gods in whose
existence they believe have claims on them, and may regard themselves
as worshippers of them all, resorting, as feeling and old association
moves them, now to one and now to another, or defining the places or
occasions at which each of them is to be sought, or in some other way
adjusting their various claims; or, on the other hand, while
believing in the exist