cribed; and they will then be set aside. Thus,
fetishism ascribed, or sought to ascribe, to the Godhead, the quality
of willingness to promote even the anti-social desires of the owner of
the fetish. And fetishism exfoliated, or peeled off from the religious
organism. Anthropomorphism, which ascribed to the divine personality
the parts and passions of man, along with a power greater than man's to
violate morality, is gradually dropped, as its inconsistency with the
idea of God comes gradually to be recognised and loathed. So too with
polytheism: a pantheon which is divided against itself cannot stand.
Thus, fetishism, anthropomorphism and polytheism ascribe qualities to
the Godhead, which are shown to be attributes assigned to the Godhead
and imposed upon it from without, for eventually they are found by
experience to be incompatible with the idea of God as it is revealed in
the common consciousness.

On the other hand, the process of the history of religion, the process
of the manifestation or revelation of the Godhead, does not proceed
solely by this negative method, or method of exclusion. If an
attribute, such as that of human form, or of complicity in anti-social
purposes, is ascribed, by anthropomorphism or fetishism, to the divine
personality, and is eventually felt by the common consciousness to be
incompatible with the idea of God, the result is not merely that the
attribute in question drops off, and leaves the idea of the divine
personality exactly where it was, and what it was, before the
attribute had been foisted on it. The incompatibility of the quality,
falsely ascribed or assigned, becomes--if, and when, it does
become--manifest and intolerable, just in proportion as the idea of
God, which has always been present, however vaguely and ill-defined,
in the common consciousness, comes to manifest itself more definitely.
The attribution, to the divine personality, of qualities, which are
eventually found incompatible with it, may prove the occasion of the
more precise and definite manifestation; we may say that action
implies reaction, and so false ideas provoke true ones, but the false
ideas do not create the new ones. The false ideas may stimulate closer
attention to the actual facts of the common consciousness and thus may
stimulate the formation of truer ideas about them, by leading to a
concentration of attention upon the actual facts. But it is from this
closer attention, this concentration of attentio