of self-consciousness, and
the slow steps by which language helped to bring forth the idea of
self, were from the first, and throughout, accompanied by the gradual
development of the idea of fetishism. But the very development of the
idea of a power which could fulfil the desires of self, as
distinguished from, and often opposed to, the interests of the
community, would stimulate the growth of the idea of a power whose
special and particular function was to tend the interests of the
community as a whole. Thus the idea of a fetish and the idea of a god
could only persist on condition of becoming more and more inconsistent
with, and contradictory of, one another. If the lines followed by the
two ideas started from the same point, it was only to diverge the
more, the further they were pursued. And the tendency of fetishism to
disappear from the later and higher stages of religion is sufficient
to show that it did not afford an adequate or satisfactory expression
of the idea contained in the common consciousness of some power or
being greater than man. That idea is constantly striving, throughout
the history of religion, to find or give expression to itself; it is
constantly discovering that such expressions as it has found for
itself do it wrong; and it is constantly throwing, or in the process
of throwing, such expressions aside. Fetishism was thrown aside sooner
than polytheism: for it was an expression not only inadequate but
contradictory to the idea that gave it birth. The emotions of fear and
suspicion, with which the community regarded fetishes, were emotions
different from the awe or reverence with which the community
approached its gods.

What practically provokes and stimulates the individual's dawning
consciousness of himself, or the community's consciousness of the
individual as in a way distinct from itself, is the dash between the
desires, wishes, interests of the one, and the desires, wishes and
interests of the other. But though the interests of the one are
sometimes at variance with those of the other, still in some cases,
also, the interests of the individual--even though they be purely
individual interests--are not inconsistent with those of the
community; and in most cases they are identical with them--the
individual promotes his own interests by serving those of the
community, and promotes those of the community by serving his own. In
a word, the interests of the one are not so clearly and plainly cut