well to notice a few of their assumptions. They assume the truth of an empirical philosophy. They resolve religious ideas into impressions of sense. Man's faculty or tendency to believe in invisible beings is unexplained. If infant and dog, savage and monkey, alike think natural objects alive, the man does, the animal does not, formulate his thoughts into a religion. Why? If man can get out of the Fetich stage, he can also get into it. Why? Faith is not the result of

passive, but active, in the

sensations. Mind is not formation of beliefs. The constitutive element is what mind brings to nature, not what nature brings to mind, otherwise no spiritual and invisible could be conceived. Our theorists assume, too, that the aboriginal state of our cultured peoples was similar to that of the lowest living savages. But surely the difference of their conditions, the one savage, the other civilized, hardly warrants such an assumption-implies rather original differences, physical and mental, fatal to it.* Then they assume a theory of development which has not a single historical instance to verify it. Examples are wanted of peoples who have grown, without foreign influence, from Atheism into Fetichism, and from it through the intermediate stages into Monotheism; and until such examples be given, hypotheses claiming to be "Natural Histories of Religion" must be judged

* Renan's "Histoire des Langues Sémitiques," p. 495.

hypotheses still. "Spontaneous generation" is as little an established fact in mental as in physical science, and its truth need not be assumed until it be proved.

We cannot, therefore, accept any hypothesis which would evolve the idea of God from delusions, or dreams, or fears. Shall we trace it, then, to a supernatural source, to a primitive revelation? But a primitive revelation were a mere assumption, incapable of proofcapable of most positive disproof. Although often advanced in the supposed interests of religion, the principle it assumes is most irreligious. If man is dependent on an outer revelation for his idea of God, then he must have what Schelling happily termed “an original Atheism of consciousness."* Religion cannot, in that case, be rooted in the nature of man-must be implanted from without. The theory that would derive man's religion from a revelation is as bad as the theory that would derive it from distempered dreams. Revelation may satisfy or rectify, but cannot create, a religious capacity or instinct, and we have the highest authority for thinking that man was created "to seek the Lord, if haply he might feel after and find Him"-the finding being by no means dependent on a written or traditional word. If there was a primitive revelation, it must have been-unless the word is used in an unusual and misleading sense-either written or oral. If written, it

* "Philos. der Mythol," i. pp. 141, 142.

could hardly be primitive, for writing is an art, a not very early acquired art, and one which does not allow documents of exceptional value to be easily lost. If it was oral, then either the language for it was created or it was no more primitive than the written. Then an oral revelation becomes a tradition, and a tradition requires either a special caste for its transmission, becomes therefore its property, or must be subjected to multitudinous changes and additions from the popular imagination—becomes, therefore, a wild commingling of broken and bewildering lights. But neither as documentary nor traditional can any traces of a primitive revelation be discovered, and to assume it is only to burden the question with a thesis which renders a critical and philosophic discussion alike impossible.

.

The natural and supernatural theories, as they may be termed, may here be dismissed. Let us now attempt to approach the question in what may be termed the historical method. This method is, indeed, of limited application. The history of no people reaches back to a very remote antiquity. Then, the religions of the ancient world are, with one exception, polytheistic in their earliest histórical form, and their Polytheism so developed as to indicate ages of growth. They seem like an ancient forest in which the underwood has become so dense as to render any attempt to pass through it, or discover the order and time of growth,

alike hopeless. But, happily, many labourers, long engaged in clearing the underwood, have met with such success, that diligent search, such as is now possible, among the roots of the old mythologies, may bring us near the discovery of the thing we seek.

In this inquiry we must confine ourselves as much as possible to the limits within which the method is applicable. Adopting, as meanwhile the most convenient, the familiar division of the race into the IndoEuropean, Semitic, and Turanian families, we shall confine ourselves to the first, leaving aside, though for opposite reasons, the second and the third. This limitation has a double advantage. It connects the discussion with ourselves. The religious ideas whose origin and evolution are to be examined were the ideas of our forefathers. There is no proof that the lake-dwellers of Switzerland, the flint-hatchet makers of Abbeville, or the aborigines of Scotland, were either our ancestors or their kindred; but there is the most positive proof that we are the lineal descendants of the Indo-Europeans who emigrated from North-western Asia. The other advantage is, that the Indo-European family seems to offer decisive disproof of a primitive Theism. If there have been in certain branches of the Semitic family tendencies to Monotheism, the most distinctive branches of the IndoEuropean have tended towards the most extravagant and multitudinous Polytheisms. No Indo-European people has

had a Jahveh like the Hebrews, or an Allah like the Mohammedans;* nor has any one had a prophet, save the partly exceptional Zoroaster, authoritative like Moses, or exclusive like Mohammed.+ The Indo-European has been, as a rule, tolerant of the different gods of different nations; the Semite intolerant of all gods except his own. The tolerance, in the one case, has increased the tendency to multiply gods; the intolerance, in the other case, has intensified the passion for unity. But under this difference there lies what at first seems similarity, but becomes on deeper examination a sharp antithesis. Indo-European man has had his passion for unity, but his unity has been abstract, impersonal. Unity of person has been the goal of Semitic thought, but unity of conception the goal of Indo-European. The highest being of the first was personal, masculine, Jahveh, Allah; but the highest being of the second was impersonal, neuter, Brahma,§ Tò ovтws öv. We must therefore distinguish between the religious and philosophic forms

* Lassen, "Indische Alterthumskunde," vol. i. p. 496 (2nd ed.). + Renan, "Histoire des Langues Sémitiques," p. 8, compares, not very happily, I think, the Semitic prophet to the Indian Avatar. The two are, save in one or two superficial points, essential contrasts. The Indian Avatar doctrine rests on the communicableness of the divine nature, but Hebrew prophecy on its incommunicableness.

This is only another side of the contrast Renan points out between the capacity of the Indo-European race to produce original philosophies, and the incapacity of the Semitic to do so ("Histoire des Langues Sémitiques," pp. 9 ff.).

§ Brahmâ (mas.) is the first god in the Hindu Trimurtti, but Brahmă (neut.) is the universal soul or substance of Hindu philosophy.