152 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 imagi- 

 nation 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-civ- 

 ilized peoples tend to establish, as Max Miiller, 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 sjjirits 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 na- 

 ture as endowed with wills and feelings like those of man, with only a 

 few differences in intensity and activity " * — which constitutes the re- 

 ligious 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 re- 

 ligious 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 en- 

 velope, 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 senti- 

 ment. 



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 pro- 

 fessed among the Hindoos, Persians, and Egyptians, with their mon- 

 strous idols, their barbarous practices, and their incoherent and coarse 

 * " Mythologie Compar^e," Paris, 1878, p. 2. 



