der another name. The
gods of a community are not the fetishes of individuals. The
difference between them is not a mere difference of name. Polytheism
may, or may not, follow, in order of time, upon fetishism; but
polytheism is not merely a form of fetishism. The two are different,
and largely inconsistent, interpretations, or misinterpretations, of
the same fundamental idea of God. They move in different directions,
and are felt by the communities in which they are found, to tend in
the direction of very different ends--the one to the good of the
community, the other, in its most characteristic manifestations, to
the injury of the community. In fetishism and polytheism we see the
radiative, dispersive, force of evolution manifesting itself, just as
in polytheism and monotheism. The different lines of evolution radiate
in different directions, but those lines, all point to a common centre
of dispersion--the idea of God. But fetishism, polytheism and
monotheism are not different and successive stages of one line of
evolution, following the same direction. They are lines of different
lengths, moving in different directions, though springing from a
common centre--the soul of man. It is because they have a common
centre, that man, whichever line he has followed, can fall back upon
it and start afresh.

The fact that men fall victims to logical fallacies does not shake our
faith in the validity of the principles of reason; nor does the fact
that false reasoning abounds the more, the lower we descend in the
scale of humanity, lead us to believe that the principles of reason
are invalid and non-existent there. Still less do we believe that,
because immature minds reason often incorrectly, therefore correct
reasoning is for all men an impossibility and a contradiction in
terms. And these considerations apply in just the same way to the
principles of religion and the idea of God, as to the principles of
reason. Yet we are sometimes invited to believe that the existence of
religious fallacies, or fallacious religions, is of itself enough to
prove that there is no validity in the principles of religion, no
reality in the idea of God; that because the uncultured races of
mankind are the victims of error in religion, there is in religion no
truth at all: the religion of civilised mankind consists but of the
errors of the savage disguised in civilised garb. So far as this view
is supposed to be the outcome of the study of the evolu