See Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 545; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 36-115. Herbert Spencer once held that fetichism was primordial. But he afterwards changed his mind, and said that the facts proved to be exactly the opposite when he had become better acquainted with the ideas of savages; see his Principles of Sociology, 1:343. Mr. Spencer finally traced the beginnings of religion to the worship of ancestors. But in China no ancestor has ever become a god; see Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 304-313. And unless man had an inborn sense of divinity, he could deify neither ancestors nor ghosts. Professor Hilprecht of Philadelphia says: “As the attempt has recently been made to trace the pure monotheism of Israel to Babylonian sources, I am bound to declare this an absolute impossibility, on the basis of my fourteen years’ researches in Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions. The faith of Israel’s chosen people is: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord.’ And this faith could never have proceeded from the Babylonian mountain of gods, that charnel-house full of corruption and dead men’s bones.” (_c_) Some of the earliest remains of man yet found show, by the burial of food and weapons with the dead, that there already existed the idea of spiritual beings and of a future state, and therefore a religion of a higher sort than fetichism. Idolatry proper regards the idol as the symbol and representative of a spiritual being who exists apart from the material object, though he manifests himself through it. Fetichism, however, identifies the divinity with the material thing, and worships the stock or stone; spirit is not conceived of as existing apart from body. Belief in spiritual beings and a future state is therefore proof of a religion higher in kind than fetichism. See Lyell, Antiquity of Man, quoted in Dawson, Story of Earth and Man, 384; see also 368, 372, 386—“Man’s capacities for degradation are commensurate with his capacities for improvement” (Dawson). Lyell, in his last edition, however, admits the evidence from the Aurignac cave to be doubtful. See art. by Dawkins, in Nature, 4:208. (_d_) The theory in question, in making theological thought a merely transient stage of mental evolution, ignores the fact that religion has its root in the intuitions and yearnings of the human soul, and that therefore no philosophical or scientific progress can ever abolish it. While the terms theological, metaphysical, and positive may properly mark the order in which the ideas of the individual and the race are acquired, positivism errs in holding that these three phases of thought are mutually exclusive, and that upon the rise of the later the earlier must of necessity become extinct.