But the Northern spirit was strongly attracted to the period of the Judges and the stories belonging to it, since it felt itself to be the continuator of the homogeneous spirit of the history of the times before David; and thus literature is indebted to an author belonging to the Northern kingdom for the ground-work of the Book of Judges.[686] Thus then was accomplished the division of the mass of legends of the Hebrews. ----- Footnote 642: Hartung, in the first part of his _Religion und Mythologie der Griechen_, contradicts himself again and again on this subject. At first he makes monotheism precede all development of religion (p. 3), then he sees nothing religious at all in monotheism (p. 28), and next the growth of religion proceeds from polytheism to monotheism, not the reverse way (p. 32). Footnote 643: Waitz, _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, I. 363 _note_. Footnote 644: _La Magie chez les Chaldéens_, p. 72. Footnote 645: _Annales de la Philosophie chrétienne_, an 1858, p. 260. Footnote 646: _Essays, Moral, Political and Literary_, ed. Green and Grose, vol. II. p. 311; compare Buckle’s _History of Civilisation in England_, in 3 vols. vol. I. p. 251; Pfleiderer, _Die Religion und ihre Geschichte_, II. 17. Before Hume the view that Polytheism was a degradation of a previous Monotheism was generally admitted. But Hume’s exposition did not put an end to this radically false idea. Creuzer’s great work, _Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen_, is based on this false assumption, and Schelling’s Philosophy of Religion starts from the same premiss. And many able English scholars still speak again and again of the degradation of the primeval Monotheism into Polytheism. Not only one-sided theologians start from this axiom; Gladstone’s mythological system, in his _Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age_, and _Juventus Mundi_ is founded upon it, all progress in history, philology and mythology notwithstanding. Footnote 647: In Virchow and Holtzendorff’s _Sammlung gemeinverständlicher wissenschaftlicher Vorträge_, 1870, Heft 97, p. 20. Footnote 648: