Mr. Max Muller says, were incapable of conceiving the meaning of such a concept.  Again, it is wrongly applied, because it has some modern religious associations, which are covertly and fallaciously introduced to explain the supposed emotions of early men.  Thus, Mr. Muller says (p. 177)—­he is giving his account of the material things that awoke the religious faculty—­’the mere sight of the torrent or the stream would have been enough to call forth in the hearts of the early dwellers on the earth . . . a feeling that they were surrounded on all sides by powers invisible, infinite, or divine.’  Here, if I understand Mr. Muller, ‘infinite’ is used in our modern sense.  The question is, How did men ever come to believe in powers infinite, invisible, divine?  If Mr. Muller’s words mean anything, they mean that a dormant feeling that there were such existences lay in the breast of man, and was wakened into active and conscious life, by the sight of a torrent or a stream.  How, to use Mr. Muller’s own manner, did these people, when they saw a stream, have mentally, at the same time, ’a feeling of infinite powers?’ If this is not the expression of a theory of ’innate religion’ (a theory which Mr. Muller disclaims), it is capable of being mistaken for that doctrine by even a careful reader.  The feeling of ‘powers infinite, invisible, divine,’ must be in the heart, or the mere sight of a river could not call it forth.  How did the feeling get into the heart?  That is the question.  The ordinary anthropologist distinguishes a multitude of causes, a variety of processes, which shade into each other and gradually produce the belief in powers invisible, infinite, and divine.  What tribe is unacquainted with dreams, visions, magic, the apparitions of the dead?  Add to these the slow action of thought, the conjectural inferences, the guesses of crude metaphysics, the theories of isolated men of religious and speculative genius.  By all these and other forces manifold, that emotion of awe in presence of the hills, the stars, the sea, is developed.  Mr. Max Muller cuts the matter shorter.  The early inhabitants of earth saw a river, and the ’mere sight’ of the torrent called forth the feelings which (to us) seem to demand ages of the operation of causes disregarded by Mr. Muller in his account of the origin of Indian religion.

The mainspring of Mr. Muller’s doctrine is his theory about ’apprehending the infinite.’  Early religion, or at least that of India, was, in his view, the extension of an idea of Vastness, a disinterested emotion of awe. {233a} Elsewhere, we think, early religion has been a development of ideas of Force, an interested search, not for something wide and far and hard to conceive, but for something practically strong for good and evil.  Mr. Muller (taking no count in this place of fetiches, ghosts, dreams and magic) explains that the sense of ‘wonderment’ was wakened by objects only semi-tangible, trees,