out of the original Monotheism through the medium of Pantheism by reason of a superfluity of religious life and over-richness in poetical inspiration.[643] Of course many theological systems endeavour to maintain this position; but also scholars who are but little influenced by theological prepossessions sometimes support it in their special provinces of study, having recourse to methods of deduction inspired mainly by an obsolete mysticism. So, for example, the sound scholar François Lenormant assumes that in Egypt Polytheism grew out of an original Monotheism by the process expressed in the following words: ‘L’idée de Dieu se confondit avec les manifestations de sa puissance; ses attributs et ses qualités furent personnifiés en une foule d’agents secondaires distribués dans une ordre hiérarchique, concourant à l’organisation générale du monde et à la conservation des êtres.’[644] This is the old story of the separation of the notion of a single god, given by an alleged primeval revelation, into its parts and factors! Another renowned investigator of Assyrian and Babylonian antiquity, Jules Oppert, also, speaks of a common monotheistic groundwork of all human religion.[645] But from the nature of the case, and in accordance with the laws of development of the human mind which can be deduced from experience, the fact is the very reverse. The history of the development of religion, modified of course in accordance with our more educated conception of its origin, appears in the main to be what old Hume asserted of it in his ‘Natural History of Religion:’ ‘It seems certain, that, according to the natural progress of human thought, the ignorant multitude must first entertain some groveling and familiar notion of superior powers, before they stretch their conception to that perfect Being, who bestowed order on the whole frame of nature. We may as reasonably imagine, that men inhabited palaces before huts and cottages, or studied geometry before agriculture, as assert that the Deity appeared to them a pure spirit, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, before he was apprehended to be a powerful though limited being, with human passions and appetites, limbs and organs. _The mind rises gradually from inferior to superior._’[646] This becomes still surer when we remember that religion begins where mythology, from the elements of which theistic religion takes its rise, ceases to live. For as these elements are always very numerous, it is not possible but that every religion must begin with a multitude of divine figures, i.e. with Polytheism. For it is impossible to point to any mythology which has to do with only one single name; yet from such a one alone could a monotheistic religion spring directly. Accordingly Polytheism is the historical _prius_ of Monotheism, which can never exhibit itself except as historically evolved out of Polytheism. The brilliant company of Olympian gods is therefore older than the first stirring of monotheistic