ular Catholicism, and of Russian orthodoxy among the peasants.
Here, he cries, in religions the history of which is known to us,
fetichism is secondary, 'and why should fetiches in Africa, where we do
not know the earlier development of religion, be considered as primary?'
What a singular argument! According to Pausanias, this fetichism (if
fetichism it is) _was_ primary, in Greece. The _oldest_ temples, in
their holiest place, held the oldest fetich. In Rome, it is at least
probable that fetichism, as in Greece, was partly a survival, partly a
new growth from the primal root of human superstitions. As to
Catholicism, the records of Councils, the invectives of the Church, show
us that, from the beginning, the secondary religion in point of time, the
religion of the Church, laboured vainly to suppress, and had in part to
tolerate, the primary religion of childish superstitions. The documents
are before the world. As to the Russians, the history of their
conversion is pretty well known. Jaroslaf, or Vladimir, or some other
evangelist, had whole villages baptized in groups, and the pagan peasants
naturally kept up their primary semi-savage ways of thought and worship,
under the secondary varnish of orthodoxy. In all Mr. Max Muller's
examples, then, fetichism turns out to be _primary_ in point of time;
_secondary_ only, as subordinate to some later development of faith, or
to some lately superimposed religion. Accepting his statement that
fetichism is ubiquitous, we have the most powerful a priori argument that
fetichism is primitive. As religions become developed they are
differentiated; it only fetichism that you find the same everywhere. Thus
the bow and arrow have a wide range of distribution: the musket, one not
so wide; the Martini-Henry rifle, a still narrower range: it is the
primitive stone weapons that are ubiquitous, that are found in the soil
of England, Egypt, America, France, Greece, as in the hands of Dieyries
and Admiralty Islanders. And just as rough stone knives are earlier than
iron ones (though the same race often uses both), so fetichism is more
primitive than higher and purer faiths, though the same race often
combines fetichism and theism. No one will doubt the truth of this where
weapons are concerned; but Mr. Max Muller will not look at religion in
this way.

Mr. Max Muller's remarks on 'Zoolatry,' as De Brosses calls it, or animal-
worship, require only the briefest comment. De Brosses