This book is a translation of the first volume of De la Saussaye's very valuable work, Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte. It is published as an experiment. If the demand for it is sufficient, the second volume will, we are told in the preface, be translated later. The change of name and this tentative method of publishing, have certain drawbacks. The book-buyer might naturally think that he was getting a new and a complete work. The translation is not marked as "Volume I," and in the judgment of the translator "forms a book by itself." It contains considerations in regard to religion in general, and a special examination of a few religions. It is certainly valuable as far as it goes; but, taken by itself, it is very incomplete. It is to be hoped that the publishers may find encouragement to continue the undertaking.
The change in the title is not the only alteration that has been made in the book. These changes, however, have been made under the direction of the author, to whose latest notes and corrections the translator has had access. It may thus be considered, she tells us, almost as a new edition. In some parts of the work these alterations are considerable. Portions of the history of the religion of Egypt, for instance, have been quite rewritten.
The translation was made under the most favorable circumstances. The author, we are told, revised every page of it; while in certain "difficult and technical" passages the translator had the valuable assistance of her father, Professor Max Müller. It must be confessed that the translation is not all that might have been expected from the conditions under which it was made. We are told, for instance (p. 156), that "the object of fasting is either to arouse or to subdue sensuality. Amongst savages it generally occurs with the former object." We are referred for examples to the fasting by which a magician prepared himself for an important act, and to that which a youth passes through preparatory to the choice of a fetich. Now we all know that Sinnlichkeit often means sensuality; but to give this translation in the case before us is to change the passage into nonsense. In the same connection we are told that "it is well known that abstinence as well as immoderate enjoyment calls forth a nervous crisis." Genuss certainly means enjoyment; but in the present case a word of more objective signification than "enjoyment" would express the meaning of the original much better.
