exposed him to attacks of wild beasts and all accidents.
It was the precursor of the storm. It was like to death and the grave.
The realm of the departed was supposed to be a land of shadows, an
underground region, an unseeing Hades or hell.

The task would be easy to show many strange corroborations of these
early chosen symbols by the exacter studies of later ages. Light, as the
indispensable condition of life, is no dream, but a fact; sight is the
highest sentient faculty; and the luminous rays are real intellectual
stimulants.[186-1] But such reflections will not escape the
contemplative reader.

I hasten to an important consequence of this dual classification of
divinities. It led to what I may call the _quantification of the gods_,
that is, to conceiving divinity under notions of number or quantity, a
step which has led to profound deterioration of the religious sentiment.
I do not mean by this the distinction between polytheism and monotheism.
The latter is as untrue and as injurious as the former, nor does it
contain a whit the more the real elements of religious progress.

It is indeed singular that this subject has been so misunderstood. Much
has been written by Christian theologians to show the superiority of
monotheisms; and by their opponents much has been made of Comte's _loi
des trois etats_, which defines religious progress to be first
fetichism, secondly polytheism, finally monotheism. Of this Mr. Lewes
says: "The theological system arrived at the highest perfection of which
it is capable when it substituted the providential action of a single
being, for the varied operations of the numerous divinities which had
before been imagined."[187-1] Nothing could be more erroneous than the
spirit of this statement; nothing is more correct, if the ordinary talk
of the superiority of monotheism in religion be admitted.

History and long experience show that monotheistic religions have no
special good effect either on the morals or the religious sensibility of
races.[187-2] Buddhism,[187-3] Mohammedanism and Judaism are, at least
in theory, uncompromising monotheisms; modern Christianity is less so,
as many Catholics pray to the Virgin and Saints, and many Protestants to
Christ. So long as _the mathematical conception of number_, whether one
or many, is applied to deity by a theological system, it has not yet
"arrived at the highest perfection of which it is capable."

For let us inquire what a monotheism is?