Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/136

 system had said its last word and was complete, when it had succeeded in embodying in some divine personality each of those forces whose combined energy produces movement in the world or guarantees its duration.

When religious evolution follows its normal course, the work of reflection goes on, and in course of time makes new discoveries. It refers, by efforts of conjecture, all phenomena to a certain number of causes, which it calls gods. It next perceives that these causes, or gods, are of unequal importance, and so it constitutes them into a hierarchy. Still later it begins to comprehend that many of these causes are but different names for one thing, that they form but one force, the application of a single law. Thus by reduction and simplification, by logic and analysis, is it carried on to recognize and proclaim the unity of all cause. And thus monotheism succeeds to polytheism.

In Egypt, religious speculation arrived on the threshold of this doctrine. Its depths were dimly perceived, and it was even taught by the select class of priests who were the philosophers of those days; but the monotheistic conception never penetrated into the minds of the great mass of the people. Moreover, by the very method in which Egyptian mythology described it, it was easily adapted to the national polytheism, or even to fetish worship. The theory of emanations