base pure fetishism, which deifies instantly each body and each phenomenon capable of exciting the feeble thought of infant humanity.  Whatever essential transformations this primitive philosophy may afterwards undergo, a judicious sociological analysis will always expose to view this primordial base, never entirely concealed, even in a religious state the most remote from the original point of departure.  Not only, for example, the Egyptian theocracy has presented, at the time of its greatest splendour, the established and prolonged coexistence, in the several castes of the hierarchy, of one of these religious epochs, since the inferior ranks still remained in simple fetishism, whilst the higher orders were in possession of a very remarkable polytheism, and the most exalted of its members had probably raised themselves to some form of monotheism; but we can at all times, by a strict scrutiny, detect in the theologic spirit traces of this original fetishism.  It has even assumed, amongst subtle intelligences, the most metaphysical forms.  What, in reality, is that celebrated conception of a soul of the world amongst the ancients, or that analogy, more modern, drawn between the earth and an immense living animal, and other similar fancies, but pure fetishism disguised in the pomp of philosophical language?  And, in our own days even, what is this cloudy pantheism which so many metaphysicians, especially in Germany, make great boast of, but generalized and systematized fetishism enveloped in a learned garb fit to amaze the vulgar.”—­Vol.  V. p. 38.

He then remarks on the perfect adaptation of this primitive theology to the initial torpor of the human understanding, which it spares even the labour of creating and sustaining the facile fictions of polytheism.  The mind yields passively to that natural tendency which leads us to transfer to objects without us, that sentiment of existence which we feel within, and which, appearing at first sufficiently to explain our own personal phenomena, serves directly as an uniform base, an absolute unquestioned interpretation, of all external phenomena.  He dwells with quite a touching satisfaction on this child-like and contented condition of the rude intellect.

“All observable bodies,” he says “being thus immediately personified and endowed with passions suited to the energy of the observed phenomena, the external world presents itself spontaneously to the spectator in a perfect harmony, such as never again has been produced, and which must have excited in him a peculiar sentiment of plenary satisfaction, hardly by us in the present day to be characterized, even when we refer back with a meditation the most intense on this cradle of humanity.”

Do not even these few fragments bear out our remarks, both of praise and censure?  We see here traces of a deep penetration into the nature of man, coupled with a singular negligence of the historical picture.  The principle here laid down as that of fetishism,