But I cannot agree with it.

The more of a 'saine appreciation,' as M.Comte calls it, I bring to bear on the known facts; the more I 'let my thought play freely around them,' the more it is inconceivable to me, according to any laws of the human intellect which I have seen at work, that savage or half-savage folk should have invented idolatries.

I do not believe that Fetishism is the parent of idolatry; but rather--as I have said elsewhere--that it is the dregs and remnants of idolatry.

The idolatrous nations now, as always, are not the savage nations; but those who profess a very ancient and decaying civilisation.

The Hebrew Scriptures uniformly represent the non- idolatrous and monotheistic peoples, from Abraham to Cyrus, as lower in what we now call the scale of civilisation, than the idolatrous and polytheistic peoples about them.