sensation. Do the languages of antiquity supply a means of designating the infinite shades and variety of colour? Democritus was acquainted with but four colours: black, white, red, and yellow. Shall we say, therefore, that the ancients did not perceive the blue of heaven? The sky was as blue for them as it is for us, but they had not yet established a conventional designation for the sensation it afforded them. And similarly in the case of the infinite for the primitive man; it existed for him although he had not as yet invented a name for it. Well, what is this infinite, in the last resort, but the object to which every religion addresses itself? A religious being is essentially one who is not satisfied with such and such a finite sensation; who looks everywhere for the beyond—looks for it in life, in death, in nature, in himself. To be divinely aware of a vague somewhat that one cannot quite understand, to feel a veneration for it and then to endeavour to fit it with a name, to call to it stammeringly, these are the beginnings of every system of religious worship. The religion of the infinite comprehends and precedes all others, and since the infinite itself is given in sensation, it follows that “Religion is simply another development of sensuous perception, quite as much as reason is.”[13] [12] _Origin and Development of Religion_, p. 210. [13] _Origin of Religion_, p. 25. [Sidenote: Equally opposed to positivists and orthodox monotheists.] Max Müller is equally critical in his attitude toward positivists, who regard fetichism as the primitive religion, and toward the orthodox, who find in monotheism the natural uncorrupted type of religion. In his opinion, to name a god or gods implies antecedently the possession of a notion of the divine, of the infinite; gods are simply the different forms, more or less imperfect indeed, in which divers peoples have bodied forth one and the same idea; religion is, so to speak, a language into which men have endeavoured to translate one and the same internal aspiration—that of comprehending the great unknown; if man’s tongue and intelligence have gone astray, if the diversity and inequality of religions are comparable to the diversity and inequality of languages, that does not necessarily mean that at bottom the veritable principle and object of all these different religions, as of all these different languages, are not very nearly the same. According to Max Müller a fetich, in the proper sense of the word (_factitius_), is no more than a symbol which presupposes an idea symbolized; the idea of God cannot come out of a fetich unless it has already been put there. Casual objects, such as stones, shells, the tail of a lion, a tangle of hair, or any such rubbish, do not possess in themselves a theogonic or god-producing character. The phenomena of fetichism, therefore, are always historically and psychologically secondary. Religions do not begin in fetichisms, it is truer to say that they end