annot be
disposed of by the charge that they think that 'every human being was
miraculously endowed' with any concept whatever. They, at least, will
agree with Mr. Max Muller that there are fetiches and fetiches, that to
one reverence is assigned for one reason, to another for another.
Unfortunately, it is less easy to admit that Mr. Max Muller has been
happy in his choice of ancient instances. He writes (p. 99): 'Sometimes
a stock or a stone was worshipped because it was a forsaken altar or an
ancient place of judgment, sometimes because it marked the place of a
great battle or a murder, or the burial of a king.' Here he refers to
Pausanias, book i. 28, 5, and viii. 13, 3. {223} In both of these
passages, Pausanias, it is true, mentions stones--in the first passage
stones on which men stood [Greek], in the second, barrows heaped up in
honour of men who fell in battle. In neither case, however, do I find
anything to show that the stones were worshipped. These stones, then,
have no more to do with the argument than the milestones which certainly
exist on the Dover road, but which are not the objects of superstitious
reverence. No! the fetich-stones of Greece were those which occupied the
holy of holies of the most ancient temples, the mysterious fanes within
dark cedar or cypress groves, to which men were hardly admitted. They
were the stones and blocks which bore the names of gods, Hera, or Apollo,
names perhaps given, as De Brosses says, to the old fetichistic objects
of worship, _after_ the anthropomorphic gods entered Hellas. This, at
least is the natural conclusion from the fact that the Apollo and Hera of
untouched wood or stone were confessedly the _oldest_. Religion,
possessing an old fetich did not run the risk of breaking the run of luck
by discarding it, but wisely retained and renamed it. Mr. Max Muller
says that the unhewn lump may indicate a higher power of abstraction than
the worship paid to the work of Phidias; but in that case all the savage
adorers of rough stones _may_ be in a stage of more abstract thought than
these contemporaries of Phidias who had such very hard work to make Greek
thought abstract.

Mr Muller founds a very curious argument on what he calls 'the ubiquity
of fetichism.' Like De Brosses, he compiles (from Pausanias) a list of
the rude stones worshipped by the early Greeks. He mentions various
examples of fetichistic superstitions in Rome. He detects the fetichism
of pop