[14] This word has met with success in Germany. Hartmann also adopts a theory of henotheism.
[15] Max Müller, as is well known, goes the length of believing that the authors of the first myths were perfectly conscious that they were speaking in parables; and that subsequent generations misunderstood them, because they personified the figures and the names by which the Divine was referred to; so that mythology becomes literally the science of a disease of language.
[16] Among the most ingenious and least contestable of Max Müller’s suggestions, we cite the paragraph devoted to the Vedic deity Aditi, one of the names of the dawn: “You will be as surprised as I certainly was surprised when the fact first presented itself to me, that there really is a deity in the Veda who is simply called the boundless or the infinite, in Sanscrit A-diti. Aditi is derived from diti, and the negative particle a. Diti, again, is regularly derived from a root DÂ (dyati), to bind, from which dita, the participle, meaning bound, and diti, a substantive, meaning binding and bound. Aditi, therefore, must originally have meant without bounds, not chained nor inclosed, boundless, infinite, infinitude.”
This etymology, on the contrary, seems to us rather to be calculated to show precisely that the conception of infinity is not primitive, and that the first time the Hindus invoked the dawn under the name of Aditi, they were far from possessing any distinction between finite and infinite. The night was for them a prison-house, the return of day was their deliverance. It is well known that they represented day as a luminous cow, which moved slowly out of the stable at night and stepped across the fields of heaven and of earth. Sometimes these cows are represented as stolen and confined in sombre caverns. Aurora herself is retained in the depths of Rita; night threatens to reign without end, but the gods set out in search of her, Indra discovers and delivers her, and with her aid, the cows bellowing for liberty are discovered in their cavern. It seems to us that for one who enters into the spirit of these primitive legends, it is easy to determine the primitive sense of Aditi. Aditi is the dawn who, confined one knows not where, succeeds at last in breaking bonds and appears radiantly in the open heaven, delivering and delivered, breaking the jail in which the hours of darkness have confined the world. Aditi is the dawn, freed and giving freedom. And, by an extension of meaning, it comes to signify the immortal and imperishable light which no power can veil or hide for more than a day. Whereas, Diti signifies what is mortal and perishable and prisoned in the bounds of matter. This construction is simple, and what is more, is confirmed by the legends to which we have just alluded; after having advocated it in the Revue philosophique (December, 1879), we find it adopted by M. Réville, Prolégomènes à l’histoire des religions, 1881.
[17] Alfred Fouillée, La liberté et le déterminisme, 2e partie.
[18] See the authors Morale anglaise contemporaine, 2e partie.
[19] See our Morale anglaise contemporaine, p. 579.
[20] Fetichism, M. Réville also says, is logically a later belief. “A fetich is a vulgar object, possessing no value in itself, but which a negro preserves, venerates, adores, because he believes that it is the dwelling place of a spirit. And the choice of the said object is not absolutely arbitrary. A fetich possesses this very special distinction, that it is the property of the person who adores it. It is in this element of individual ownership—ownership by the tribe or the family—that the difference clearly appears between the object of a naturist religion, and the fetich, properly so called. However humble it may be—tree, rock, or rivulet—the first is independent, is accessible to all, to strangers as to indigenes, on the sole condition that they conform to the exigencies of the ritual or the cult. The sun shines for everybody, the mountain is accessible to all who scale its sides, the spring refreshes the passer-by, whatever be his tribe; the very tree which rises in the midst of the desert asks of the traveller some mark of deference, and does not trouble itself about his origin. One cannot appropriate a natural object. It is otherwise with a fetich. Once adopted by a family, it is in some sort in the service of that family and has nothing to do with others.” This definition of fetichism is quite special, and in no wise concerns primitive fetichism, conceived as an ascription of something analogous to the human will in all inanimate things.
[21] Spencer, Principles of Sociology.
[22] See, among others, M. Vacherot, La religion.