Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/558

 REVIEWS.

L'Origine de l'Idee de Dieu. Etude Historico-Critique et Positive. P'^ Partie. Historico-Critique. Par le Pere GuiLLAUME Schmidt, S.V.D. Vienne, Autriche : Imp, des Mechitharistes, 1910. 410, pp. xiii + 316.

In compliance with many requests, he tells us, Pere Schmidt republishes from his excellent serial, Anthropos, the first part, — historical and critical, — of his work on " The Origin of the Idea of God." His purpose is to ask for criticism, which he will grate- fully receive : meanwhile he bids us remark that he does not yet propound his own solution of the problem of the Origin of the Idea of God. That solution he promises to give us in a later work.

It is not an easy task for me to speak of the book of Pere Schmidt, because he professes great obligations to my own writings on the evolution of religion, though, naturally, he differs from me on various points. Perhaps I may be allowed to explain how I arrived at my present opinions. They are, in fact, derived from study of the writings of Mr. E. B. Tylor. In the earlier editions of his Primitive Culture^ a book of forty years ago, he made it plain that certain peoples, when first studied by Europeans, were not, indeed "monotheists," did not "assign the distinctive attributes of deity to none save the Almighty Creator," but did exhibit, "high above the doctrine of souls, of divine manes, of local nature-spirits, of the great deities of class and element . . . shadowings, quaint or majestic, of the conception of a Supreme Deity." 1

^ Primitive Culture, vol. ii., p. 302 (ist edit.).