It mast be repeated that on this theory an explanation is given of what the old Degeneration hypothesis does not explain.  Granting a primal religion relatively pure in its beginnings, why did it degenerate?

Mr. Max Mullet, looking on religion as the development of the sentiment of the Infinite, regards fetishism as a secondary and comparatively late form of belief.  We find it, he observes, in various forms of Christianity; Christianity, therefore, is primary there, relic worship is secondary.  Religion beginning, according to him, in the sense of the infinite, as awakened in man by tall trees, high hills, and so on, it advances to the infinite of space and sky, and so to the infinitely divine.  This is primary:  fetishism is secondary.  Arguing elsewhere against this idea, I have asked:  What was the modus of degeneration which produced similar results in Christianity, and in African and other religions?  How did it work?  I am not aware that Mr. Max Mueller has answered this question.  But how degeneration worked—­namely, by Animism supplanting Theism—­is conspicuously plain on our theory.

Take the early chapters of Genesis, or any savage cosmogonic myth you please.  Deathless man is face to face with the Creator.  He cannot degenerate in religion.  He cannot offer sacrifice, for the Creator obviously needs nothing, and again, as there is no death, he cannot slay animals for the Creator.  But, in one way or another, usually by breach of a taboo, Death enters the world.  Then comes, by process of evolution, belief in hungry spirits, belief in spirits who may inhabit stones or sticks; again there arise priests who know how to propitiate spirits and how to tempt them into sticks and stones.  These arts become lucrative and are backed by the cleverest men, and by the apparent evidence of prophecies by convulsionaries.  Thus every known kind of degeneration in religion is inevitably introduced as a result of the theory of Animism.  We do not need an hypothesis of Original Sin as a cause of degeneration, and, if Mr. Max Mueller’s doctrine of the Infinite were viable, we have supplied, in Animism, under advancing social conditions, what he does not seem to provide, a cause and modus of degeneration.  Fetishism would thus be really ‘secondary,’ ex hypothesi, but as we nowhere find Fetishism alone, without the other elements of religion, we cannot say, historically, whether it is secondary or not.  Fetishism logically needs, in some of its aspects, the doctrine of spirits, and Theism, in what we take to be its earliest known form, does not logically need the doctrine of spirits as given matter.  So far we can go, but not farther, as to the fact of priority in evolution.  Nevertheless we meet, among the most backward peoples known to us, among men just emerged from the palaeolithic stage of culture, men who are involved in dread of ghosts, a religious Idea which certainly is not born of ghost-worship, for by these men, ancestral ghosts are not worshipped.