of awe in presence of the
hills, the stars, the sea, is developed. Mr. Max Muller cuts the matter
shorter. The early inhabitants of earth saw a river, and the 'mere
sight' of the torrent called forth the feelings which (to us) seem to
demand ages of the operation of causes disregarded by Mr. Muller in his
account of the origin of Indian religion.

The mainspring of Mr. Muller's doctrine is his theory about 'apprehending
the infinite.' Early religion, or at least that of India, was, in his
view, the extension of an idea of Vastness, a disinterested emotion of
awe. {233a} Elsewhere, we think, early religion has been a development
of ideas of Force, an interested search, not for something wide and far
and hard to conceive, but for something practically _strong_ for good and
evil. Mr. Muller (taking no count in this place of fetiches, ghosts,
dreams and magic) explains that the sense of 'wonderment' was wakened by
objects only semi-tangible, trees, which are _taller_ than we are, 'whose
roots are beyond our reach, and which have a kind of life in them.' 'We
are dealing with a quartenary, it may be a tertiary troglodyte,' says Mr.
Muller. If a tertiary troglodyte was like a modern Andaman Islander, a
Kaneka, a Dieyrie, would he stand and meditate in awe on the fact that a
tree was taller than he, or had 'a kind of life,' 'an unknown and
unknowable, yet undeniable something'? {233b} Why, this is the sentiment
of modern Germany, and perhaps of the Indian sages of a cultivated
period! A troglodyte would look for a 'possum in the tree, he would tap
the trunk for honey, he would poke about in the bark after grubs, or he
would worship anything odd in the branches. Is Mr. Muller not
unconsciously transporting a kind of modern malady of thought into the
midst of people who wanted to find a dinner, and who might worship a tree
if it had a grotesque shape, that, for them, had a magical meaning, or if
boilyas lived in its boughs, but whose practical way of dealing with the
problem of its life was to burn it round the stem, chop the charred wood
with stone axes, and use the bark, branches, and leaves as they happened
to come handy?

Mr. Muller has a long list of semi-tangible objects 'overwhelming and
overawing,' like the tree. There are mountains, where 'even a stout
heart shivers before the real presence of the _infinite_'; there are
rivers, those instruments of so sudden a religious awakening; there is
earth. These suppl