text:  Not only for example the Egyptian theocracy has presented at the time of its greatest splendour the established and prolonged coexistence in the several castes of the hierarchy of one of these religious epochs since the inferior ranks still remained in simple fetishism whilst the higher orders were in possession of a very remarkable polytheism and the most exalted of its members had probably raised themselves to some form of monotheism; but we can at all times by a strict scrutiny detect in the theologic spirit traces of this original fetishism