A more advanced stage in the history of fetichism is that which is reached by reflection on the fact that a fetich not unfrequently ceases to prosper the undertakings of its possessor in the way he expected it to do. On the principles of animism, everything that is--whether animate, or inanimate according to our notions--is made up of spirit, or soul, and body. In the case of man, when he dies, the spirit leaves the body. When, therefore, a fetich ceases to act, the explanation by analogy is that the spirit has left the body, the inanimate, with which it was originally associated; and when that is the case, then, as we learn from Miss Kingsley (_Travels in West Africa_, pp. 304-305), "the little thing you kept the spirit in is no more use now, and only fit to sell to a white man as 'a big curio.'" The fact that, in native belief, what we call an inanimate thing may lose its soul and become really dead is shown by Miss Kingsley in a passage quoted by Dr. Haddon: "Everything that he," the native, "knows by means of his senses he regards as a twofold entity--part spirit, part not spirit, or, as we should say, matter; the connection of a certain spirit with a certain mass of matter, he holds, is not permanent. He will point out to you a lightning-struck tree, and tell { 119} you its spirit has been broken; he will tell you when the cooking-pot has been broken, that it has lost its spirit" (_Folk-Lore_, VIII, 141). We might safely infer then that as any object may lose its spirit, so too may an object which has been chosen as a fetich; even if we had not, as we have, direct testimony to the belief.
Next, when it is believed that an object may lose its spirit and become dead indeed, there is room and opportunity for the belief to grow that its spirit may pass into some other object: that there may be a transmigration of spirits. And when this belief arises, a fresh stage in the history of fetichism is evolved. And the fresh stage is evolved in accordance with the law that governs the whole evolution of fetichism. That law is that a fetich is an object believed to aid its possessor in attaining the end he desires. In the earliest stage of its history anything which happens to arrest a man's attention when he is in a state of expectancy "is involuntarily associated with what is about to happen," and so becomes a fetich. In the most developed stage of fetichism, men are not content to wait until they stumble across a fetich, and when they do so to say, "Ha! ha! art thou there?" Their mental attitude becomes { 120} interrogative: "Ha! ha! where art thou?" They no longer wait to stumble across a fetich, they proceed to make one; and for that procedure a belief in the transmigration of spirits is essential. An object, a habitation for the spirit, is prepared; and he is invited, conjúred, or cónjured, into it. If he is conjúred into it, the attitude of the man who invites him is submissive; if cónjured, the mental attitude of the performer is one of superiority. Colonel Ellis throughout all his careful enquiries found that "so great is the fear of giving possible offence to any superhuman agent" that (in the region of his observation) we may well believe that even the makers of fetiches did not assume to command the spirits. But elsewhere, in other regions, it is impossible to doubt but that the owners of fetiches not only conjúre the spirits into the objects, but also apply coercion to them when they fail to aid their possessor in the accomplishment of his wishes. That, I take it, is the ultimate stage in the evolution, the fine flower, of fetichism. And it is not religion, it has no value as religion, or rather its value is anti-religious. Even if we were to accept as a definition of religion that it is the conciliation of beings conceived to be superior, we should be compelled by { 121} the definition to say that fetichism in its eventual outcome is not religion, for the attitude of the owner towards his fetich is then one of superiority, and his method is, when conciliation fails, to apply coercion.