In every religious belief there are of necessity two parts: an intellectual element, a knowledge which constitutes the object of belief, and an emotional state, a feeling which accompanies the former and expresses itself in action. To any one deficient in the second element, the religious feeling is unknown, inaccessible; nothing remains to such persons but abstract metaphysical conceptions. The study of the religious sentiment, in its evolution, cannot dissociate these two elements; and it is the degree in which the element of knowledge is present which renders a precise division possible. I trace three periods: (1) that of perception and concrete imagination, where fear and the practical, utilitarian tendencies are predominant; (2) that of medium abstraction and generalisation, characterised by the addition of moral elements; (3) that of the highest concepts, where, the emotional element becoming more and more rarefied, the religious feeling tends to be confounded with the so-called intellectual feelings. I. As usual, authorities are not agreed on the question of origin. Under what form did the religious sentiment first make its appearance? We must first put aside two extremely systematic answers, which, although differing in spirit, have this in common, that they are both purely intellectualist. The first, a very ancient one, has found its latest and clearest interpreter in Max Müller, who thinks that the notion of the Divine, more especially under the form of the Infinite, preceded that of the gods. Our senses give us the finite, but “beyond, behind, beneath, and within the finite, the infinite is always present to our senses. It presses upon us, it grows upon us from every side. What we call finite in space and time, in form and word, is nothing but a veil or net which we ourselves have thrown over the infinite.”[189] What, then, is the infinite, he asks, but the object of all religions? The religion of the infinite precedes and comprehends all others, and as the infinite is implied by the senses (_i.e._, the limits to our sensory perceptions imply an unlimited region beyond), it follows that religion can, with as much right as reason, be called a development of our sensory perceptions. The earliest religion consisted in the adoration of various objects, taken, each in turn, and isolatedly, as incarnations of the notion of the Infinite. This is what Max Müller calls “Henotheism.” For him, polytheism and even fetichism are later developments, resulting from the breaking up of the primitive unity, and due to a disease of language: each name becomes a distinct deity; words are raised to the dignity of things, having their life, their attributes, and their legends: _Nomina numina_. ----- Footnote 189: Max Müller, _Origin and Development of Religion_ (Hibbert Lectures), p. 227. -----