em in which the beings
worshipped were conceived to possess a personality more clearly defined
than that attributed to totems but less developed than that assigned to
deities. From the beginning each tribe had worshipped a plurality of
totems; it was, therefore, readily intelligible that, as these totems
came to be credited with more and more definite and developed
personality, the plurality of totems became not only a polydaemonism,
but afterwards a plurality of deities, and a system of polytheism came
to be established. From polytheism then, amongst the Israelites,
monotheism was conceived to have been gradually developed.

On this theory the evolution of religion was, if we may so describe it,
linear or rectilinear: the process consisted in a series of successive
stages. In some cases, as for instance among the aborigines of
Australia, it never rose higher than its starting-point, totemism; in
others, as for instance in Samoa, it became polytheism without ceasing
to be totemism; in others again, as for instance amongst the Aryan
peoples, it became so completely polytheistic that even conjecture can
discover but few indications or 'survivals' of the totemism from which
it is supposed to have developed; and the polytheism of the Israelites
was so completely superseded by monotheism that the very existence of an
earlier stage of polytheism could be as strenuously denied in their case
as the pre-existence of totemism could be denied amongst the
polytheistic Aryans. Nevertheless the theory was that if we represent
the growth of the various religions of the world diagrammatically by
vertical lines parallel to one another but of various lengths, one line
standing for totemism, a longer line for polydaemonism, a still longer
one for polytheism, and the longest of all for monotheism, we should see
that the line of growth has been the same in all cases, and that it is
in their length, or (shall we say?) in their height alone that the
various lines differ, and that the longest line culminates in monotheism
only because it has been, so to speak, pulled out in the same way that a
telescope when closed, may be extended. The evolution of religion on
this view has been a process literally of 'evolution' or unfolding: the
idea of a god and of communion with him has been present from the
beginning; and, much though religion may have changed, it remains to the
end essentially the same thing. This view of the process of religious
evolut