ceiving it, yet each one of us has but to
retrace his own mental history, to detect the essential
characters of this initial state. Nay, even eminent thinkers of
the present day, when they allow themselves to be involuntarily
ensnared (under the influence, but partially rectified, of a
vicious education) to attempt to penetrate the mystery of the
essential production of any phenomenon whose laws are not
familiar to them, they are in a condition personally to
exemplify this invariable instinctive tendency to trace the
generation of unknown effects to a cause analogous to life,
which is no other, strictly speaking, than the principle of
fetishism....

"Theologic philosophy, thoroughly investigated, has always
necessarily for its base pure fetishism, which deifies
instantly each body and each phenomenon capable of exciting the
feeble thought of infant humanity. Whatever essential
transformations this primitive philosophy may afterwards
undergo, a judicious sociological analysis will always expose
to view this primordial base, never entirely concealed, even in
a religious state the most remote from the original point of
departure. 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. It has even assumed, amongst
subtle intelligences, the most metaphysical forms. What, in
reality, is that celebrated conception of a soul of the world
amongst the ancients, or that analogy, more modern, drawn
between the earth and an immense living animal, and other
similar fancies, but pure fetishism disguised in the pomp of
philosophical language? And, in our own days even, what is this
cloudy pantheism which so many metaphysicians, especially in
Germany, make great boast of, but generalized and systematized
fetishism enveloped in a learned garb fit to am