of the idea of God. The Indo-European tendency was to religious multiplicities, but to philosophic unities. The unity or monism, which was the product of the speculative reason in the historic period, was by no means a Monotheism; while the multitude of mythological persons which sprang up in the pre-historic period certainly formed a Polytheism.

It is the more necessary to emphasize this distinction as so much has been written about the development of Monotheism among the Greeks. It is not time yet to discuss that part of our question. And here we can only note the contrast between the Deity of a philosophy, and the God of a religion. The one is an object of worship, the other a product of speculation. In the one case, God must be conceived as a person or power standing in a certain relation to the worshipper; in the other, Deity is the first or final proposition forming the base or the summit of a system of reasoned truth. Religion may exist without philosophy, has always existed before it, and may, when it has passed from the instinctive and imaginative stages into the reflective, attempt to represent in system, or justify to thought, its idea of God; but while the two may thus become allies, they can never, save in the mind of some transcendentalist, be identical. Religion has often given the idea of God to philosophy, but philosophy has never given a God to religion. The speculative God of the Brahmans

B

remained an object of speculation.* And not one of the Greek schools gave a God to Greek worship. The development of abstract conceptions-space, time, the infinite, the absolute, the supreme good-is not the development of Monotheism, just as a system of thought is not a religion.

We return to our problem. What was the genesis of the religious idea of God? Our first step must be to determine the primitive form of that idea among the Indo-European peoples. Here we assume (1) the original unity of the Indo-European family of nations; (2) that the rudimentary form of their civilization was in existence prior to their separation; and (3) that the Indo-European mythologies send their roots into that distant time, are branches whose parent stem is the faith of the still united family. Discussion of mythological theories is here unnecessary. Our own view, and the reasons for it, will appear in the sequel.‡

Let us start, then, from the well-known fact that, while the Indo-European mythologies in their earliest

* Nor does the worship of Brahmâ (mas.) seem to have been general (Lassen, "Indis. Alterthumsk., i. p. 776, 1st edition). He was too much a product of the reflective priestly consciousness to be a people's god.

+ See pp. 272 ff.

A most exhaustive and philosophic discussion of mythological theories, combined with a triumphant assertion of the origin of mythology in the religious conceptions of a people, will be found in Schelling's "Philos. der Mythol.," vol. i. Erstes Buch.

literary forms reveal developed and multitudinous Polytheisms, their elements become simpler and fewer the farther they are traced back.* The more cultured Greeks believed that the religion of the ancients had been much simpler than that of their own age, and that the mythical elements had been added either for poetical or political purposes. While each philosophic school had, according to its own fundamental principles, a different—either allegorical, physical, or historical— method of interpreting the national mythology, each agreed with the others in repudiating the literal and popular sense. In the Homeric and Hesiodic poems fragments can be found which seem like the survivors of an earlier faith, and look, even in the old epics, like the curiously carved stones of an ancient Gothic cathedral built into the walls of a modern church, or, to use Welcker's figure, like the fauna and flora of a lost world preserved in the successive strata of the earth's crust.§ The simpler Polytheism standing behind

* Welcker, "Griechische Götterlehre," vol. i. p. 129; Blackie, "Homer and the Iliad," vol. i. p. 23.

+ Herodotus, lib. ii. 53; Plato, "De Repub.," lib. ii. §§ 18 ff., vol. vi. pp. 380 ff. (Bekker); Aristotle, “Metaphys.," lib. xi. 8; Creuzer, "Symbolik und Mythol. der Alten Völker," i. pp. 3 ff.

Zeller, "Philosophie der Griechen," ii. 305 ff., 554 ff. (ed. 1846), iii. 299 (ed. 1865); Max Müller, "Lectures on the Science of Language," ii. lect. ix.

§ Creuzer, "Symbolik und Mythol.," iii. pp. 64-67; Welcker, "Griechis. Götterlehre," i. pp. 5-8.

the Greek epics can, in great part, be deciphered, and the several streams whose confluence form it traced to their respective Indo-European, Pelasgic, Hellenic, Oriental, and Egyptian fountain-heads. The process is thus one of increasing simplification. Diversity and multiplicity alike tend to disappear as historical analysis dissolves the tribal and temporal accretions, and resolves the faith of the early Greek settlers into its primal elements.

What is true of the Greek branch of the IndoEuropean mythology is also true of the Indian. The Vedic hymns represent a much earlier phase of mythological development than the Homeric poems.* If we may use Schelling's terms,† changing somewhat their sense, we would say, the Homeric Polytheism is successive, i.e., its gods have each a history and a place in a definite system; but the Vedic Polytheism is simultaneous, i.e., has no developed system-now one god, now another, is supreme. § The simultaneous is much

* Muir's "Sanskrit Texts," v. pp. 3, 4; Müller, "Chips from a German Workshop," i. p. 26.

"Philosophie der Mythologie,” i. p. 120. Lassen, "Indis. Alterthumskunde," i. 908. § Müller's "Hist. of Ancient Sans. Lit.," p. 546. Since the above was written I have read the first of a series of papers entitled, "Vedenstudiën," in De Gids for June 1871, by Mr. P. A. S. van Limburg Brouwer. The writer gives a fresh and interesting, but I think, in some respects, incorrect interpretation of Vedic Polytheism. The several gods are personalized natural phenomena, but God the power in nature which

more primitive than the successive stage. There has been time to create, not to systematize. But behind the Vedas lies a still earlier faith, or rather a series of earlier faiths, which can be determined partly from the hymns themselves, and partly from a comparison of Vedic deities with those of other Indo-European peoples. Indra is the supreme Vedic god, but his origin cannot be placed earlier than the immigration into India, where he soon thrust the older and, morally, higher Varuna into the background, as Varuna seems at a still earlier period to have superseded Dyaus. Then, many gods known to the Indian are unknown to the other Indo-Europeans, and can only be regarded as additions to the primitive faith held by the undivided family. But centuries behind the Vedas we find a point where a still earlier phase of Indo-European mythology can be studied-the point where the two branches that had grown longest together parted, to form the Indian and Iranian peoples, and to develop religions almost the exact anti

produces them. There is apparent plurality, but actual unity.-De Gids, June, pp. 395 ff.

* Of course only comparatively supreme. See former reference to Müller, and also Lassen, "Indis. Alterthumsk.," i. pp. 893—895; Muir's "Sanskrit Texts," v. sec. v.

Benfey, "Orient und Occident," i. pp. 48, 49, note 275; Muir's "Sanskrit Texts," v. 118.

Muir's "Sans. Texts," v. p. 116.