[Footnote 4: This view is the basis of M. Andre Lefevre's _La Religion_. Paris, 1892.] 4. The Great Nature-powers came First.--We come in the last place to that class of deities which we spoke of first--the powers of nature. By several great writers it is held that the worship of these is the original form of all religion. We shall give two of the leading theories on the subject, that of Mr. Max Mueller and that of Ed. von Hartmann. Mr. Max Mueller has written very strongly against the view that fetishism is a primary form of religion, and holds that the worship of casual objects is not a stage of religion once universally prevalent, but is, on the contrary, a parasitical development and of accidental origin. He does not tell us what the original religion of mankind was. The work in which he deals most directly with this question[5] is concerned chiefly with the Indian faith, the early stages of which he regards as the most typical instance of the growth of religion generally. He does not, however, tell us definitely out of what earlier kind of religion that of the Aryans grew, which India best teaches us to know, or what religion they had before they developed that of the Vedic hymns. We may infer, however, what his view on this point is from the very interesting sketch he draws of the psychological advance man could make, in selecting objects of reverence, from one class of things to another (p. 179, _sqq._). First, there are tangible objects, which, however, Mr. Max Mueller denies that mankind as a whole ever did worship; such things as stones, shells, and bones. Then second, semi-tangible objects; such as trees, mountains, rivers, the sea, the earth, which supply the material for what may be called _semi-deities_. And third, intangible objects, such as the sky, the stars, the sun, the dawn, the moon; in these are to be seen the germs of _deities_. At each of these stages man is seeking not for something finite but for the infinite; from the first he has a presentiment of something far beyond; he grasps successive objects of worship not for themselves but for what they seem to tell of, though it is not there, and this sense of the infinite, even in poor and inadequate beliefs, is the germ of religion in him. When he rises after his long journey to fix his regards on the great powers of nature, he apprehends in them something great and transcendent. He applies to them great titles; he calls them _devas_, shining ones; _asuras_, living ones; and, at length, _amartas_, immortal ones. At first these were no more than descriptive titles, applied to the great visible phenomena of nature as a class. They expressed the admiration and wonder the young mind of man felt itself compelled to pay to these magnificent beings. But by giving them these names he was led instinctively to regard them as persons; he ascribed to them human attributes and dramatic actions, so that they became definite, transcendent, living personalities. In