The Hebrew nation was preserved from the state of intellectual passivity by the aroused consciousness of national individuality. The consciousness of individuality awoke, and as soon as it was fully roused, there began that section of the life of the nation which was distinguished by a peculiar productiveness on the domain of ideas. The influences received from outside could be neither extinguished nor cancelled, seeing that to them was mainly due the formation of the mind of the nation; but the national consciousness had now introduced a new condition of further civilisation, which caused these foreign elements to be dealt with in a peculiar and independent way. No doubt a long time was needed to allow the results of this national reaction to strike root in the soul of the nation; but we shall see that a true Hebraism was formed by slow progress out of Canaanism, until at last the choicest and noblest minds of the nation seized upon the idea which gave full expression to the principle of nationality and freed it from the last traces of Canaanitish influence. § 2. The consequences of the national reaction are exhibited in the first representatives of the house of David, in the history of the Hebrew nation and in the desire of political unity to put an end to the old disunion and give strength against the Canaanites. The religious and political centralisation, which forms the program of David and Solomon, was the first and most forcible expression of the roused national spirit. I will leave the political arrangements on one side; for although they certainly come within the range of the general description which I have to give of the character of the period, yet the nature of these studies urges me more to consider the forces which act on the history of religion. With reference to this I must prefix some almost self-evident remarks on the relation of Polytheism to Monotheism: self-evident I say, yet even now still doubted and disputed, because on this subject even the least prejudiced inquirers on questions of antiquity and the history of ancient civilisation still use words in accordance with the old traditional system.[642] The idea that a Monotheistic instinct is inherent in a certain race or certain nations is refuted by historical facts so far as relates to the Semites, the consideration of whose psychological condition had suggested the opinion, and has also been exhibited as generally untenable by Steinthal’s and Max Müller’s psychological criticism of the meaning of instinct. But equally untrue is the idea of an original Monotheism, which later in history dissolved into Polytheism. This idea, which moreover identified the original monotheism with that of the Bible, prevailed almost universally in former times. Recently Rougemont, a French ethnologist, has endeavoured, in his work ‘Le Peuple Primitif’ (1855), to find a basis for it by supposing Polytheism to have sprung