The discovery of the Vedas aided greatly in stimulating these ambitions. In the Vedas, scholars had a written text, whose antiquity was undoubtedly exaggerated at the moment of its discovery, but which is surely one of the most ancient which we have at our disposition in an Indo-European language. Here they were enabled to study, by the ordinary methods of philology, a literature as old as or older than Homer, and a religion which was believed more primitive than that of the ancient Germans. A document of such value was evidently destined to throw a new light upon the religious beginnings of humanity, and the science of religions could not fail to be revolutionized by it.
The conception which was thus born was so fully demanded by the state of the science and by the general march of ideas, that it appeared almost simultaneously in two different lands. In 1856, Max Müller exposed its principles in his _Oxford Essays_.[136] Three years later appeared the work of Adalbert Kuhn on _The Origin of Fire and the Drink of the Gods_,[137] which was clearly inspired by the same spirit. When once set forth, the idea spread very rapidly in scientific circles. To the name of Kuhn is closely associated that of his brother-in-law Schwartz, whose work on _The Origin of Mythology_,[138] followed closely upon the preceding one. Steinthal and the whole German school of _Völkerpsychologie_ attached themselves to the same movement. The theory was introduced into France in 1863 by M. Michel Bréal.[139] It met so little resistance that, according to an expression of Gruppe,[140] "a time came when, aside from certain classical philologists, to whom Vedic studies were unknown, all the mythologists had adopted the principles of Max Müller or Kuhn as their point of departure."[141] It is therefore important to see what they really are, and what they are worth.
Since no one has presented them in a more systematic form than Max Müller, it is upon his work that we shall base the description which follows.[142]
We have seen that the postulate at the basis of animism is that religion, at least in its origin, expresses no physical reality. But Max Müller commences with the contrary principle. For him, it is an axiom that religion reposes upon an experience, from which it draws all its authority. "Religion," he says, "if it is to hold its place as a legitimate element of our consciousness, must, like all other knowledge, begin with sensuous experience."[143] Taking up the old empirical adage, "_Nihil est in intellectu quod non ante fuerit in sensu_," he applies it to religion and declares that there can be nothing in beliefs which was not first perceived. So here is a doctrine which seems to escape the grave objection which we raised against animism. From this point of view, it seems that religion ought to appear, not as a sort of vague and confused dreaming, but as a system of ideas and practices well founded in reality.