[643]. Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, I. 363 note.
[644]. La Magie chez les Chaldéens, p. 72.
[645]. Annales de la Philosophie chrétienne, an 1858, p. 260.
[646]. Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Green and Grose, vol. II. p. 311; compare Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England, in 3 vols. vol. I. p. 251; Pfleiderer, Die Religion und ihre Geschichte, II. 17. Before Hume the view that Polytheism was a degradation of a previous Monotheism was generally admitted. But Hume’s exposition did not put an end to this radically false idea. Creuzer’s great work, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, is based on this false assumption, and Schelling’s Philosophy of Religion starts from the same premiss. And many able English scholars still speak again and again of the degradation of the primeval Monotheism into Polytheism. Not only one-sided theologians start from this axiom; Gladstone’s mythological system, in his Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, and Juventus Mundi is founded upon it, all progress in history, philology and mythology notwithstanding.
[647]. In Virchow and Holtzendorff’s Sammlung gemeinverständlicher wissenschaftlicher Vorträge, 1870, Heft 97, p. 20.
[648]. Polit. I. 1. 7: καὶ τοὺς θεοὺς δὲ διὰ τοῦτο πάντες φασὶ βασιλεύεσθαι, ὅτι καὶ αὐτοι, οἱ μὲν ἔτι καὶ νῦν, οἱ δὲ τὸ ἀρχαῖον ἐβασιλεύοντο· ὥσπερ δὲ καὶ τὰ εἴδη ἑαυτοῖς ἀφομοιοῦσιν οἱ ἄνθρωποι, οὕτω καὶ τοὺς βίους τῶν θεῶν. Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, I. 466, says: ‘Considering the multitude of superhuman beings, it is certainly very natural to follow the analogy of human relations, which is often carried out with great consistency, and to assume gradations of power among them, one being regarded as the first and highest of all. But this idea may easily be rendered unfruitful through the very analogy which suggested it, because in human society the power and repute of individuals are frequently changing.’ But even this fact is not unfruitful with regard to religion; for on this analogy a world of gods with a head liable to change may be imagined.
[649]. Schelling’s Sämmtliche Werke (Cotta’s edition, 1856), II. Abth. I, 52 (Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie).
[650]. Theogon. vv. 882–85.
[651]. Palgrave, Central and Eastern Arabia, I. 33.
[652]. Von Holtzendorff in the Zeitsch. für Völkerpsychologie etc., 1868, V. 378.