rs of persons.' Zoolatry
is intertwisted with the earliest and most widespread law of prohibited
degrees. How did the Hindoos dispense with the aid of these
superstitions? Well, they did not quite dispense with them. Mr. Max
Muller remarks, almost on his last page (376), that 'in India also . . .
the thoughts and feelings about those whom death had separated from us
for a time, supplied some of the earliest and most important elements of
religion.' If this was the case, surely the presence of those elements
and their influence should have been indicated along with the remarks
about the awfulness of trees and the suggestiveness of rivers. Is
nothing said about the spirits of the dead and their cult in the Vedas?
Much is said, of course. But, were it otherwise, then other elements of
savage religion may also have been neglected there, and it will be
impossible to argue that fetichism did not exist because it is not
mentioned. It will also be impossible to admit that the 'Hibbert
Lectures' give more than a one-sided account of the Origin of Indian
Religion.

The perusal of Mr. Max Muller's book deeply impresses one with the
necessity of studying early religions and early societies simultaneously.
If it be true that early Indian religion lacked precisely those
superstitions, so childish, so grotesque, and yet so useful, which we
find at work in contemporary tribes, and which we read of in history, the
discovery is even more remarkable and important than the author of the
'Hibbert Lectures' seems to suppose. It is scarcely necessary to repeat
that the negative evidence of the Vedas, the religious utterances of
sages, made in a time of what we might call 'heroic culture,' can never
disprove the existence of superstitions which, if current in the former
experience of the race, the hymnists, as Barth observes, would
intentionally ignore. Our object has been to defend the 'primitiveness
of fetichism.' By this we do not mean to express any opinion as to
whether fetichism (in the strictest sense of the word) was or was not
earlier than totemism, than the worship of the dead, or than the
involuntary sense of awe and terror with which certain vast phenomena may
have affected the earliest men. We only claim for the powerful and
ubiquitous practices of fetichism a place _among_ the early elements of
religion, and insist that what is so universal has not yet been shown to
be 'a corruption' of something older and purer.

O