rely _odd_, and therefore probably endowed with unknown mystic
qualities. Or they may have been pointed out in a dream, or met in a
lucky hour and associated with good fortune, or they may (like a tree with
an unexplained stir in its branches, as reported by Kohl) have seemed to
show signs of life by spontaneous movements; in fact, a thing may be what
Europeans call a fetish for scores of reasons. For our present purpose, as
Mr. Tylor says, 'to class an object as a fetish demands explicit statement
that a spirit is considered as embodied in it, or acting through it, or
communicating by it, or, at least, that the people it belongs to do
habitually think this of such objects; or it must be shown that the object
is treated as having personal consciousness or power, is talked with,
worshipped...' and so forth. The in-dwelling spirit may be human, as when
a fetish is made out of a friend's skull, the spirit in which may even be
asked for oracles, like the Head of Bran in Welsh legend.

We have tried to show that the belief in human souls may be, in part at
least, based on supernormal phenomena which Materialism disregards. We
shall now endeavour to make it probable that Fetishism (the belief in the
souls tenanting inanimate objects) may also have sources which perhaps are
not normal, or which at all events seemed supernormal to savages. We say
'perhaps not normal' because the phenomena now to be discussed are of the
most puzzling character. We may lean to the belief in a supernormal cause
of certain hallucinations, but the alleged movements of inanimate objects
which probably supply one origin of Fetishism, one suggestion of the
presence of a spirit in things dead, leave the inquiring mind in
perplexity. In following Mr. Tylor's discussion of the subject, it is
necessary to combine what he says about Spiritualism in his fourth with
what he says about Fetishism in his fourteenth and later chapters. For
some reason his book is so arranged that he criticises 'Spiritualism'
long before he puts forward his doctrine of the origin and development of
the belief in spirits.

We have seen a savage reason for supposing that human spirits inhabit
certain lifeless things, such as skulls and other relics of the dead. But
how did it come to be thought that a spirit dwelt in a lifeless and
motionless piece of stone or stick? Mr. Tylor, perhaps, leads us to a
plausible conjecture by writing: 'Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women in
Keeling Island,