, in
specified circumstances, experienced as a fact of the common
consciousness. Or a body of men may have a common purpose, or a common
idea, as well as an emotion of, say, common alarm. If the purpose,
idea or emotion, be common to them and experienced by all of them, it
is a fact of their common consciousness. In this case, as in the case
of any alleged but disputed discovery in science, the common
consciousness is the court of appeal which decides the facts, and
determines whether what an individual thinks he has discovered in his
consciousness is really a fact of the common consciousness. The idea
of powers superior to man, the emotion of awe or reverence, which goes
with the idea, and the purpose of communicating with the power in
question are facts, not peculiar to this or that individual
consciousness, but facts of the common consciousness of all mankind.

The child up to a certain age has no consciousness of self: the
absence of self-consciousness is one of the charms of children. The
child imitates its elders, who speak of him and to him by his name. He
speaks of himself in the third person and not in the first person
singular, and designates himself by his proper name and not by means
of the personal pronoun 'I'; eventually the child acquires the use and
to some extent learns the meaning of the first personal pronoun; that
is, if the language of the community to which he belongs has developed
so far as to have produced such a pronoun. For there was a period in
the evolution of speech when, as yet, a first personal pronoun had not
been evolved; and that, probably, for the simple reason that the idea
which it denotes was as unknown to the community as it is to the child
whose absence of self-consciousness is so pleasing. For a period, the
length of which may have been millions of years, the common
consciousness, the consciousness of the community, did not discover or
discriminate, in language or in thought, the existence of the
individual self.

The importance of this consideration lies in its bearing upon the
question, in what form the idea of powers superior to man disclosed
itself in the common consciousness at that period. It is held by many
students of the science of religion that fetishism preceded polytheism
in the history of religion; and it is undoubted that polytheism
flourished at the expense of fetishism. But what is exactly the
difference between fetishism and polytheism? No one now any longer
h