Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/132

 theologians of Thebes and Heliopolis. In the interior of the temples, there was a small class of mystics who took pleasure in contemplating "the 'One' who exists by his own essential power, the only being who substantially exists." Even then men tried, as they have often done since, to define the undefinable, to grasp the incomprehensible, to perceive the supreme "" through the shifting and transparent veil of natural phenomena. But those refined metaphysics never touched and influenced the crowd, and never will. The deity, in order to be perceived by them and to touch their feelings, must have his unity broken; he must, if the expression be admissible, be cut up into morsels for them.

By a process of abstraction which is as old as religion itself, the human intelligence is led to consider separately each of the qualities of existence, each of the forces which it perceives to be at work either within man himself or in the exterior world. At first it thinks those forces and qualities are distributed impartially to all creation. It confounds existence with life. Hence the reign of fetishism, when man believes, as young children do, that thought, passion, and volition like his own, are to be found in everything he meets. His own image seems to him reflected as in a mirror with a thousand converging facets, and he is unable to distinguish the real condition of things outside it.

Certain celestial and terrestrial bodies make a particularly strong impression upon his mind by their size, their beauty, by their evil or beneficial effects upon himself. They fill him with more than the average gratitude, admiration, or terror. Driven by the illusion which possesses him, he places the origin of those qualities which seem to him the highest and most important, in the bodies which have made so deep an impression upon his senses; to them he attributes the friendly or hostile influences which alternately excite his desire and his fear. According to circumstances a fetish might be a mountain, a rock or a river, a plant or an animal. It might be those heavenly bodies which exercised much more influence over the life of primitive man than they do over us; it might be the moon and stars, which tempered the darkness of the night and diminished its terrors; it might be the cloud, from whose bosom came rain and thunder; above all, it might be the sun which returned every morning to light and warm the world. Differences of climate and race had their modifying effect, but everywhere one common characteristic is to be found. It was always to some