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held to be idolatrous. It is not to the natural object but to the 

 spirit residing within it, that the worship is paid. " In modern 

 times," says Mr. Tylor,* " it is among the negroes of the Xew 

 Guinea coast that the clearest idea of the sea-god is to be found 

 when the native kings, praying him not to be boisterous, would 

 have rice and cloth, and bottles of rum, and even slaves, cast 

 into the sea as sacrifices." The modern Parsi worships not the 

 sun but the Sun-god, as the ancient Egyptians worshipped Ea. 

 Traces of such sun-worship are not wanting in the Old Testament ;t 

 it was one of the forces constantly threatening the pure mono- 

 theism of Israel. 



From the sim and the ocean, from the thunder and the 

 lightning, and such other powerful and impressive natural 

 forces, the conception of spirits, innate and inherent in natural 

 objects, came to be spread over the whole face of Xature. 

 But it was always the spirit of the object and not the object 

 which was worshipped. Thus Waitz^ makes the following 

 remark : A negro who paid honour and offered food to a tree 

 was told that the tree did not eat anything: he defended 

 himself against the criticism by replying, ' Oh ! it is not 

 the tree which is fetish ; the fetish is a spirit which is 

 invisible, but he has incorporated himself in this tree. It is 

 true that he cannot consume our material foods, Init he 

 enjoys the spiritual part of them, and leaves behind the 

 material part which we see.' " 



But the omnipresent religions and personal interpretation 

 of Xature,"' as Grote§ calls it, so natural to primitive man, 

 soon went a step further. It attributed to natural objects 

 not only life and force but volition. And this, too, was the 

 result cif judging Xature by the standard of humanity. Man 

 was conscious of will in hunself ; he knew that he could do 

 things or refrain from doing them at will. He knew, too, 

 that his fellow men could do him either good or, more 



* Anthropology^ ch. 14, p. 360. 



t Deut. iv, 19 ; xvii, 3. ii Kmgs xxiii, 11. 



X Anthropologie der Xaturvdlker, vol. ii, p. 188. 



^ History of Greece^ preface, p. viii. 



