book, The Ancient World and Christianity, hastily assumes that Müller regards sensuous perception as the source of religious ideas. Müller himself rejects this as a mere suspicion of his position, and De La Saussaye has remarked upon the total injustice of such an inference. Müller's view fairly interpreted is that the idea of the Infinite is not the product of mere perception of nature, but is called forth from its slumbers in man's soul. It is a concomitant sentiment. It is difficult to see how nature or heroes can be deified without a prior concept of Deity in the soul. A sensuous perception is never wholly sensuous, since the a priori elements of the reason operate upon the sense-perceptions. Müller accepts the Kantian view of casuality, and believes that in the "starry heavens above and in the moral law within man," we have a true basis for Physical and Anthropological Religion.
In this treatment of Greek conceptions of the spirit-world, Rohde gives us an exceedingly valuable contribution to one of the most interesting branches of Anthropology. The book is occupied with description of facts rather than with exposition of them, and is conservatively written. Hardly too much can be said in praise of the mastery of the material and of the directness of its presentation. The least satisfactory part of the book, it seems to me, is the author's account of animism in the Homeric Age. The treatment is not only scant, but fails to convey even a definite conception of what Homeric animistic notions were. The author disagrees with both Nagelsbach and Grotemeyer in his interpretation of the Homeric personality; it is not the body, with Nagelsbach, which is the man, nor is it the Psyche, with Grotemeyer. This contradiction in Homer, who sometimes speaks of the body as the real person and opposed to the Psyche, and again, of the Psyche on its way to Hades as the man proper, is reconciled by the author on the ground that there are two "selves." Both the body and the Psyche may be called the "self." Man has a double personality, viz. the man visible to sense, and the invisible self, which is set free at death. This Psyche dwells in the living man like a guest, a second ego. As a parallel to this, the author cites the conceptions among primitive peoples of a double life in man. So, too, the Roman genius in its original meaning was a second "self." This interpretation has much in its favor; the metaphysical difficulty which such duality might offer would, of course, have nothing to do with its historical correctness as an Homeric doctrine.
