THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION'S. 153 



myths, seemed either an ignorant distortion, or a willful disguise of the 

 pure and profound doctrines taught in the earliest ages of the world. 



From Germany, where the symbolical school of Creuzer had pre- 

 tended to find in the ancient fables allegories veiling the treasures 

 of primitive religion, this illusion passed to France and to England, 

 where it still has many adepts. 



A more complete and more minute study of the documents in which 

 it was believed the echoes of primitive humanity could be found, has 

 discovered that they contain much chaff mixed with the good grain ; 

 that they depict, not a monotheism in its decline, but a monotheism in 

 course of formation ; and that they are the product of a long sacerdotal 

 elaboration, not the primary expression of the religious feeling in its 

 contact with Nature.* 



Nowhere has the contradiction between the theory of original per- 

 fection in religion, and the accumulated conclusions of archaeology, 

 ethnography, experimental psychology, general history, and religious 

 science appeared to me more marked than in the recent work of M. de 

 Pressense on the " Origins," precisely because the writer in it impar- 

 tially expounded all the facts acquired or legitimately presumed by 

 contemporary science. He shows that the religious sentiment has been 

 exalting and purifying itself since prehistoric times. Does not the 

 losrical conclusion from this seem to be that that sentiment began with 

 most imperfect and gross manifestations ? But M. de Pressense, gen- 

 eralizing from the fact that a confused belief in a supreme divinity is 

 met among some savages addicted to the practices of fetichism, con- 

 cludes that monotheism was the primitive faith of man. *' Because 

 man in his extreme degradation," he says, " tried to find the divine 

 idea and attach himself to it, he must necessarily have possessed it 

 primitively in its grandeur." f M, de Pressense approaches the prob- 

 lem of our moral and religious origins with the preconceived notion of 

 a fall, of a degradation suffered by mankind for having violated the 

 moral law, during a first trial of liberty. He does not see that this 

 explanation explains nothing, and that it leaves intact the question, 

 how mankind could at first have realized the divine idea in its pleni- 

 tude — except by causing to intervene at the beginning, as M. de 

 Pressense seems inclined to do, a supernatural revelation, or by hold- 

 ing with the poet — 



"L'homme est un diea tomb6 qai se souvient des cieux " 

 (Man is a fallen god, who has memories of the sky). 



* Mr. Max Muller has done me the honor to quote a passage from my lectures on 

 India, in which I brought out the contrast of the ancient Biahmanic philosophy with the 

 idolatry, almost fetichism, with which the stranger's eyes are struck on his arrival in 

 Hindostan. But by this, I in no way intended to maintain that the vulgar practices of 

 Hindooism were a degradation of the Vedic theology, still less that that represented the 

 original and complete condition of the Hindoo conceptions. 



f E. de Pressense, " Les Origines," Paris, 18S3, p. 491. 



