Note 42 — Chapter II · RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.

“Henotheism,” says Von Hartmann, “rests upon a contradiction. Man goes forth in search of divinity, and finds gods. He addresses each of these divinities in succession in the hope that he may be the divinity sought for, and confers upon him a multitude of predicates which call in question the divinity of the other gods. Obliged, however, as he is to look to different gods for the fulfilment of his respective demands he is unable to remain faithful to any one of them; he changes his object of adoration repeatedly and each time acts toward the god he is addressing as if he were god par excellence, without indeed himself observing at the time that he is denying the supreme divinity of any god by attributing it in turn to each of them. What renders the origin of religion possible is that this contradiction is not at first remarked; a persistent failure to recognize such a contradiction would not be possible in the midst of the progress of civilization, except in the case of an extreme intensity of religious sentiment, which shields all religious subjects from rational criticism. Such intensity of religious sentiment neither exists in all places nor at all times, and a spirit of intellectual criticism, operating intermittently, suffices in the long run to render the point of view of henotheism untenable. Two ways of avoiding the contradiction in question offer themselves. One may maintain the unity of God at the expense of the plurality, or, on the contrary, plurality of God at the expense of the unity. The first way leads to abstract monism, the second to polytheism; and out of polytheism, by a process of degeneration, arise polydemonism or animism and then fetichism.”