ther or not early man derived his
belief in the multitude of spirits by which he believed himself to be
surrounded, from his belief in the separable human soul, there is no
doubt that he did consider himself to be so surrounded. Animism in
this sense is undoubtedly the beginning of some at least of the great
religions.

3. The Minor Nature-worship came First.--M. Reville holds[3] that the
tree and the river and other such beings were the first gods, and
that the deification of the great powers of nature came afterwards as
an extension of the same principle. Mr. Max Mueller seems to share
this view when he says that man was led from the worship of
semi-tangible objects, which provided him with semi-deities, to that
of intangible objects, which gave him deities proper. The Germans, as
a rule, hold the view that the great nature-worship came first, and
that the sanctity of the tree and the river came to them from above,
these objects being regarded as lesser living beings deserving to be
worshipped as well as the greater ones. The English school let the
sanctity of these objects come to them as it were from below; when
man has come to believe in spirits, he concludes that they have
spirits too, and worships the spirits he supposes to dwell in them.
It does not seem that these theories are entirely exclusive of each
other. French writers suppose that the minor nature-worship first
sprang up of itself, half-animal man respecting the animals as
rivals, the trees as fruit-bearers for his hunger, and so on, and
that spirits were added to these beings when the great animistic
movement of thought in which these writers believe took place, of
course at a very early period.[4]

[Footnote 3: Reville, _Histoire des religions des peuples
non-civilises_, ii. 225.]

[Footnote 4: This view is the basis of M. Andre Lefevre's _La
Religion_. Paris, 1892.]

4. The Great Nature-powers came First.--We come in the last place to
that class of deities which we spoke of first--the powers of nature.
By several great writers it is held that the worship of these is the
original form of all religion. We shall give two of the leading
theories on the subject, that of Mr. Max Mueller and that of Ed. von
Hartmann.

Mr. Max Mueller has written very strongly against the view that
fetishism is a primary form of religion, and holds that the worship
of casual objects is not a stage of religion once universally
prevalent, but is, on the contrary, a para