Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 8, 2025
And how often does the missionary discover a tribe or a race, whose moral intelligence is higher than that of the average of paganism. Nay, the same race, or tribe, passes from one phase of polytheism to another; in one instance exhibiting many of the elements and truths of natural religion, and in another almost entirely suppressing them.
The capriciousness of fortune points to a plurality of gods; the tendency to conceive all things like ourselves gives them human characteristics; the powerful impression made by all that comes within the sphere of the senses incites us to connect the divine power with visible objects; the allegorical laudation and deification of eminent men leads to a completed polytheism.
And the difference is that polytheism means a plurality of gods, whereas fetichism knows no gods, but only spirits. Inasmuch then as, on the theory whether it is held by Höffding or by anybody else that the spirits of fetichism become the gods of polytheism, there must be differences between the spirits of the one and the gods of the other, let us enquire what the differences are supposed to be.
In examining the religious systems of Arabia in the age preceding the advent of the Prophet, it would seem that the most prominent of them were the old doctrines of the Magians and Sabaeans, blended with a gross idolatry and a senseless polytheism.
Indeed the Chinese seem to have a mental aversion to the conception of a personal god, and to think either of the host of earth spirits and other demons, or else of the pantheistic abstraction of heaven. Wherever we can trace back polytheism to its earliest stages we find that it results from combinations of monotheism.
They do not seem to have been conceived as being men, or the souls of men which manifested themselves in animals or trees. At the time when polydaemonism has, as yet, not become polytheism, the personal beings, worshipped in this or that external form, have not as yet been anthropomorphised.
The religion of Africa is the universal animism or fetishism of primitive peoples, rising to polytheism and approaching monotheism chiefly, but not wholly, as a result of Christian and Islamic missions. Of fetishism there is much misapprehension. It is not mere senseless degradation. It is a philosophy of life.
Naturally, then, the inquiry that we have set ourselves to will at the same time be an inquiry how far Christian thought has affected these three main Hindu doctrines of Pantheism, Transmigration, and Maya. Nor is it to be imagined that the Hindu polytheism, theism, and pantheism are distinguishable religious strata.
The gods of popular belief could not survive in the light of ancient thought, which in its essence was free-thought, not tied down by dogmas. But the philosophers of old could not but believe that a psychological fact of such enormous dimensions as ancient polytheism must have something answering to it in the objective world.
He wonders, indeed, until he remembers how it has itself been transformed and changed in popular substance, from lofty metaphysics and ethics into pantheism for the shorn, and into polytheism for the unshorn. Looking at early Japanese pictures with the eye of the historian, as well as of the connoisseur of art, one will see that the first real school of Japanese art was Buddhistic.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking