Otherwise, we cannot
understand how an _unfelt_ distinction of this sort could be
mentally _seen_. But Dr. Farrar means more than imagination, for
he says, "from this source is derived the whole system of genders
for inanimate things, which was perhaps inevitable at that early
childish stage of the human intelligence, when the actively working
soul attributed to everything around it some portion of its own life.
Hence, well-nigh everything is spoken of as masculine or feminine."
[122] We are surprised that Dr. Farrar seems to think German an
exception, in making a masculine noun of the moon. He has failed
to apply to this point his usual learned and laborious investigation.
[123]

Diogenes Laertius describes the theology of the Jews as an offshoot
from that of the Chaldees, and says that the former affirm of the
latter "that they condemn images, and especially those persons who
say that the gods are male and female." [124] Which condemnation
implies the prevalence of this sexual distinction between their
deities.

In concluding this chapter we think that it will be granted that
gender in the personification of inanimate objects was the result of
sex in the animate subject: that primitive men saw the moon as a
most conspicuous object, whose spots at periods had the semblance
of a man's face, whose waxing and waning increased their wonder:
whose coming and going amid the still and solemn night added to
the mystery: until from being viewed as a man, it was feared,
especially when apparently angry in a mist or an eclipse, and so
reverenced and worshipped as the heaven-man, the monthly god.

III. THE MOON A WORLD-WIDE DEITY.

Anthropomorphism, or the representation of outward objects in the
_form_ of _man_, wrought largely, as we have seen, in the
manufacture of the man in the moon; it entered no less into the
composition of the moon-god. The twenty-first verse of the fiftieth
Psalm contains its recognition and rebuke. "Thou thoughtest that I
was altogether as thyself"; or, still more literally, "Thou hast thought
that being, I shall be like thee." As Dr. Delitzsch says, "Because
man in God's likeness has a bodily form, some have presumed to
infer backwards therefrom that God also has a bodily form like to
man, which is related by way of prototype to the human form."
[125] As well might we say that because a watchmaker constructs a
chronometer with a movement somewhat like that of his own heart,
therefore he is me