It remains to determine what these primary notions that lay at the bottom of all religions were. And here begins the disagreement among the principal authorities on the science of religion. Some of them explain the birth of religion by a sort of mysterious intuition of supra-sensible verity, by a divination of God; others regard it as an intellectual error, a false hypothesis, which was natural, however, and perhaps inevitable to primitive intelligence. The first look upon religion as an immense leap on the part of the human mind over and beyond the limits of the physical world in which we are confined, the second believe it to be born in the beginning of an inexact interpretation of the commonest phenomena of the world, of objects of our senses or of our consciousness; for the first, religion is more than science; for the second, religion is pseudo-science. All idealists—Strauss, Renan, Matthew Arnold—discover in every religion the germ of their own especial form of refined idealism, and bow down before it with a respect that might well appear ironical if they did not affirm themselves to be quite sincere; they see in religions generally the noblest and most lasting product of the human mind. Their extreme adversaries, on the contrary, see no more in the origin of religions than, as Auguste Comte would have said, the expression of a gross fetichism. [Sidenote: Is religion a species of illusion?] It is evident that the problem of the origin of religion, in the new form in which it presents itself to-day, is quite as grave as ever it was; formerly the question was whether religion is revealed or natural; to-day the question is whether religion is or is not true—whether it is or is not the product of an intellectual error, of a sort of inevitable optical illusion which it is the business of science to explain and to correct; whether, in effect, the god of mythical and symbolical religion is not simply a magnified idol. [Sidenote: The positivist theory no longer in possession of the field.] The positivist theory of religion seemed some years ago close upon its ultimate triumph.[10] Many had accepted it, but without having fully perceived all of its consequences. At the present moment it is, on the contrary, strongly contested. New elements have been introduced into the problem and the whole question must be gone over again. Max Müller in especial has made what might be almost called a desperate effort to make out a case for the objectivity and essential rationality of religion, which had both been compromised by positivism.[11] From a different point of view Herbert Spencer also, in his “Sociology,” has criticised theories which regard fetichism or naturism as the principle of religion. [10] We find it adopted or almost so even by spiritualists, like M. Vacherot, _La religion_, Paris, 1869. [11] See _Origin and Development of Religion_, by F. Max Müller, M. A. [Sidenote: Max Müller’s theory.]