This doctrine rests, in part, upon a certain number of linguistic postulates which have been and still are very much questioned. Some have contested the reality of many of the similarities which Max Müller claimed to have found between the names of the gods in the various European languages. The interpretation which he gave them has been especially doubted: it has been asked if these names, far from being the mark of a very primitive religion, are not the slow product, either of direct borrowings or of natural intercourse with others.[161] Also, it is no longer admitted that the roots once existed in an isolated state as autonomous realities, nor that they allow us to reconstruct, even hypothetically, the original language of the Indo-Europeans.[162] Finally, recent researches would tend to show that the Vedic divinities did not all have the exclusively naturistic character attributed to them by Max Müller and his school.[163] But we shall leave aside those questions, the discussion of which requires a special competence as a philologist, and address ourselves directly to the general principles of the system. It will be important here not to confound the naturistic theory with these controverted postulates; for this is held by numbers of scholars who do not make language play the predominating rôle attributed to it by Max Müller.
That men have an interest in knowing the world which surrounds them, and consequently that their reflection should have been applied to it at an early date, is something that everyone will readily admit. Co-operation with the things with which they were in immediate connection was so necessary for them that they could not fail to seek a knowledge of their nature. But if, as naturism pretends, it is of these reflections that religious thought was born, it is impossible to explain how it was able to survive the first attempts made, and the persistence with which it has maintained itself becomes unintelligible. If we have need of knowing the nature of things, it is in order to act upon them in an appropriate manner. But the conception of the universe given us by religion, especially in its early forms, is too greatly mutilated to lead to temporarily useful practices. Things become nothing less than living and thinking beings, minds or personalities like those which the religious imagination has made into the agents of cosmic phenomena. It is not by conceiving of them under this form or by treating them according to this conception that men could make them work for their ends. It is not by addressing prayers to them, by celebrating them in feasts and sacrifices, or by imposing upon themselves fasts and privations, that men can deter them from working harm or oblige them to serve their own designs. Such processes could succeed only very exceptionally and, so to speak, miraculously. If, then, religion's reason for existence was to give us a conception of the world which would guide us in our relations with it, it was in no condition to fulfil its function, and people would not have been slow to perceive it: failures, being infinitely more frequent than successes, would have quickly shown them that they were following a false route, and religion, shaken at each instant by these repeated contradictions, would not have been able to survive.
