his body.
They do not seem to have been conceived as being men, or the souls of
men which manifested themselves in animals or trees. At the time when
polydaemonism has, as yet, not become polytheism, the personal beings,
worshipped in this or that external form, have not as yet been
anthropomorphised. Indeed, the process which constitutes the change
from polydaemonism to polytheism consists in the process, or rather is
the process, by which the spirits, the personal beings, worshipped in
tree, or sky, or cloud, or wind, or fire came gradually to be
anthropomorphised--to be invested with human parts and passions and to
be addressed like human beings with proper names. But when
anthropomorphic polytheism is thus pushed to its extreme logical
conclusions, its tendency is to collapse in the same way, and for the
same reasons, as fetishism, before it, had collapsed. What man had
been in search of, from the beginning, and was still in search of, was
some personal being or power, higher than and superior to man. What
anthropomorphic polytheism presented him with, in the upshot, was with
beings, not superior, but, in some or many cases, undeniably inferior
to man. As such they could not thenceforth be worshipped. In Europe
their worship was overthrown by Christianity. But, on reflection, it
seems clear not only that, as such, they could not thenceforth be
worshipped; but that, as such, they never had been worshipped. In the
consciousness of the community, the object of worship had always been,
from the beginning, some personal being superior to man. The apostle
of Christianity might justifiably speak to polytheists of the God
'whom ye ignorantly worship.' It is true, and it is important to
notice, that the sacrifices and the rites and ceremonies, which
together made up the service of worship, had been consciously and
intentionally rendered to deities represented in human form; and, in
this sense, anthropomorphic deities had been worshipped. But, if
worship is something other than sacrifice and rite and ceremony, then
the object of worship--the personal being, greater than man--presented
to the common consciousness, is something other than the
anthropomorphic being, inferior in much to man, of whom poets speak in
mythology and whom artists represent in bodily shape.

Just as fetishism developed and persisted, because it did contain,
though it perverted, one element of religious truth--the accessibility
of the power worshipped