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POLYNESIAN MYTHOLOGY.
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vault of heaven, and at last, by what is called a natural mistake, of One who dwells in heaven above.
There is some truth in every one of these views; but they become untrue by being generalized. The time has not come yet, it probably never will come, when, we shall be able to assert anything about the real beginnings of religion in general. We know a little here, a little there, but whatever we know of early religion, we always see that it presupposes vast periods of a still earlier development.
Some people imagine that fetishism, at all events, presupposes nothing: they would probably not hesitate to ascribe to some of the higher animals the faculty of fetishworship. But few words are so devoid of scientific precision as fetishism, a term first rendered popular by the writings. of De Brosses. Let us suppose that it means a kind of temporary worship of any material object which the fancy may happen to select, as a tree, a stone, a post, an animal:can that be called a primitive form of religion? First of all, religion is one thing, worship another, and the two are by no means necessarily connected. But, even if they were, what is the meaning of worship paid to a stone, but the outward sign of a pre-existent belief that this stone is more than a stone, something supernatural, it may be something divine, so that the ideas of the supernatural and the divine, instead of growing out of fetishism, are generally, if not always, presupposed by it? The same applies to ancestor-worship, which often presupposes the conceptions of immortality and of the ideal unity of a family, and in many cases implies a belief that the spirits of the departed are worthy to share the honours paid to divine beings.
To maintain that all religion begins with fetishism, all mythology with ancestor-worship, is simply untrue, as far as our present knowledge goes. There is fetishism, there is ancestor-worship, there is nature-worship, whether of trees or serpents, of mountains or rivers, of clouds and meteors,
