Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/162

152 stages, they mistake for successive stages three different aspects of the human mind. And, when they declare that all religions must have traversed successively the three phases of fetichism, polytheism, and monotheism, they again sacrifice the facts to the spirit of system. By fetichism, Comte understands the worship of material objects, trees, stones, shells, rivers, mountains, celestial bodies, etc., which the imagination of the primitive man arbitrarily invested with supernatural powers, without, however, seeing in them the work or residence of a spirit. But the numerous observations made in our days on non-civilized peoples tend to establish, as Max Müller, Herbert Spencer, Albert Reville, and many others have superabundantly demonstrated, that fetichism as thus understood is nowhere a primitive religion; that it always accompanies and presupposes belief in spirits lodged in things or wandering in space; that it is unknown among people who are placed at the bottom of the religious scale, and reaches its maximum among nations that are relatively advanced.

If by fetichism we understand, with M. Girard de la Rialle, "the tendency to regard all phenomena, all beings, and all the bodies of nature as endowed with wills and feelings like those of man, with only a few differences in intensity and activity" —which constitutes the religious state defined as Naturism by M. Albert Reville—I am ready to admit that something of the kind may have been the first form of religious practice. But the definition goes no further than that of the orthodox positivists, for it implies a previous distinction of body and mind, and worship is in reality exclusively addressed to the latter. Mr. Frederic Harrison maintains that the official religion of China had preserved the type of primitive fetichism, because in it the sky, the earth, and the heavenly bodies were adored, considered objectively, and not as the residences of immaterial beings. Now, all those who have closely studied the ancient religion of the Chinese Empire tell us that veneration is addressed, not to the material appearances of the phenomena of nature, but to the invisible spirits of which the sky, the earth, and the constellations appear respectively as the inseparable envelope, the sensible manifestation, the vestment, or the body. As to adoration of material objects frankly regarded as such, fetichism is a secondary derivative, and not the first form of the religious sentiment.

Another philosophical prejudice, of a contrary bearing, is the one that represents the historical religions as the feeble echo of a primitive monotheism, qualified by natural religion. It seemed to receive a striking confirmation in the first half of this century, when the most ancient monuments of Eastern thought put off their veils before our dazzled eyes. All that we had known till then of the religions professed among the Hindoos, Persians, and Egyptians, with their monstrous idols, their barbarous practices, and their incoherent and coarse