the animal-
worship of Egypt, and the respect paid by Greeks and Romans to shapeless
stones, as survivals of older savage practices.

The position of De Brosses is this: Old mythology and religion are a
tissue of many threads. Sabaeism, adoration of the dead, mythopoeic
fancy, have their part in the fabric. Among many African tribes, a form
of theism, Islamite or Christian, or self-developed, is superimposed on a
mass of earlier superstitions. Among these superstitions, is the worship
of animals and plants, and the cult of rough stones and of odds and ends
of matter. What is the origin of this element, so prominent in the
religion of Egypt, and present, if less conspicuous, in the most ancient
temples of Greece? It is the survival, answers De Brosses, of ancient
practices like those of untutored peoples, as Brazilians, Samoyeds,
Negroes, whom the Egyptians and Pelasgians once resembled in lack of
culture.

This, briefly stated, is the hypothesis of De Brosses. If he had
possessed our wider information, he would have known that, among savage
races, the worships of the stars, of the dead, and of plants and animals,
are interlaced by the strange metaphysical processes of wild men. He
would, perhaps, have kept the supernatural element in magical stones,
feathers, shells, and so on, apart from the triple thread of Sabaeism,
ghost-worship, and totemism, with its later development into the regular
worship of plants and animals. It must be recognised, however, that De
Brosses was perfectly well aware of the confused and manifold character
of early religion. He had a clear view of the truth that what the
religious instinct has once grasped, it does not, as a rule, abandon, but
subordinates or disguises, when it reaches higher ideas. And he avers,
again and again, that men laid hold of the coarser and more material
objects of worship, while they themselves were coarse and dull, and that,
as civilisation advanced, they, as a rule, subordinated and disguised the
ruder factors in their system. Here it is that Mr. Max Muller differs
from De Brosses. He holds that the adoration of stones, feathers,
shells, and (as I understand him) the worship of animals are, even among
the races of Africa, a corruption of an earlier and purer religion, a
'parasitical development' of religion.

However, Mr. Max Muller himself held 'for a long time' what he calls 'De
Brosses's theory of fetichism.' What made him throw the theory
overbo