The problem of Physical Religion has now assumed a totally different aspect, as treated by the Historical School. Instead of endeavouring to explain how human beings could ever worship the sky as a god, we ask, how did any human being come into possession of the predicate god? We then try to discover what that predicate meant when applied to the sky, or the sun, or the dawn, or the fire. With us the concept of God excludes fire, the dawn, the sun, and the sky; at all events, the two concepts no longer cover each other. What we want to study therefore is that ever-varying circumference of the predicate god, which becomes wider or narrower from century to century, according to the objects which it was made to include, and after a time to exclude again.
Friedrich Max Müller, Physical Religion, Lecture VI
