44 THE ORIGIN OF ANIMAL-WORSHIP. 



of a tall, fat man as a mountain of flesh? And, among a 

 people prone to speak in still more concrete terms, would 

 it not happen that a chief, remarkable for his great bulk, 

 would be nicknamed after the highest mountain within 

 sight, because he towered above other men as this did 

 above surrounding hills ? Such an occurrence is not sim 

 ply possible, but probable. And, if so, the confusion of 

 metaphor with fact would originate this surprising gene 

 alogy. A notion perhaps yet more grotesque, thus re 

 ceives a satisfactory interpretation. &quot;What could have put 

 it into the imagination of any one that he was descended 

 from the dawn ? Given the extremest credulity, joined 

 with the wildest fancy, it would still seem requisite that 

 the ancestor should be conceived as an entity ; and the 

 dawn is entirely without that definiteness and compara 

 tive constancy which enter into the conception of an 

 entity. But when we remember that &quot; the Dawn &quot; is a 

 natural complimentary name for a beautiful girl opening 

 into womanhood, the genesis of the idea becomes, on the 

 above hypothesis, quite obvious. 



Another indirect verification is that we thus get a 

 clear conception of Fetichism in general. Under the feti- 

 chistic mode of thought, surrounding objects and agents 

 are regarded as having powers more or less definitely per 

 sonal in their natures. And the current interpretation is, 

 that human intelligence, in its early stages, is obliged to 

 conceive of their powers under this form. I have myself 

 hitherto accepted this interpretation ; though always with 

 a sense of dissatisfaction. This dissatisfaction was, I 

 think, well grounded. The theory is scarcely a theory 

 properly so called ; but rather, a restatement in other 

 words. Uncivilized men do habitually form anthropo 

 morphic conceptions of surrounding things ; and this ob- 



