became concentric, and eventually were united.  And so the lines between the gods were wiped out, as it were, by their conceptions crowding upon one another.  There was another factor, however, in the development of this unconscious, or, at least, unacknowledged, pantheism.  Aided by the likeness or identity of attributes in Indra, Savitar, Agni, Mitra, and other gods, many of which were virtually the same under a different designation, the priests, ever prone to extravagance of word, soon began to attribute, regardless of strict propriety, every power to every god.  With the exception of some of the older divinities, whose forms, as they are less complex, retain throughout the simplicity of their primitive character, few gods escaped this adoration, which tended to make them all universally supreme, each being endowed with all the attributes of godhead.  One might think that no better fate could happen to a god than thus to be magnified.  But when each god in the pantheon was equally glorified, the effect on the whole was disastrous.  In fact, it was the death of the gods whom it was the intention of the seers to exalt.  And the reason is plain.  From this universal praise it resulted that the individuality of each god became less distinct; every god was become, so to speak, any god, so far as his peculiar attributes made him a god at all, so that out of the very praise that was given to him and his confreres alike there arose the idea of the abstract godhead, the god who was all the gods, the one god.  As a pure abstraction one finds thus Aditi, as equivalent to ’all the gods,’[25] and then the more personal idea of the god that is father of all, which soon becomes the purely personal All-god.  It is at this stage where begins conscious premeditated pantheism, which in its first beginnings is more like monotheism, although in India there is no monotheism which does not include devout polytheism, as will be seen in the review of the formal philosophical systems of religion.

It is thus that we have attempted elsewhere[26] to explain that phase of Hindu religion which Mueller calls henotheism.

Mueller, indeed, would make of henotheism a new religion, but this, the worshipping of each divinity in turn as if it were the greatest and even the only god recognized, is rather the result of the general tendency to exaltation, united with pantheistic beginnings.  Granting that pure polytheism is found in a few hymns, one may yet say that this polytheism, with an accompaniment of half-acknowledged chrematheism, passed soon into the belief that several divinities were ultimately and essentially but one, which may be described as homoiotheism; and that the poets of the Rig Veda were unquestionably esoterically unitarians to a much greater extent and in an earlier period than has generally been acknowledged.  Most of the hymns of the Rig Veda were composed under the influence of that unification of deities and tendency to a quasi-monotheism, which