and unfamiliar object is in this
first stage of fetishism regarded as the external covering of a
spiritual power which has assumed what is believed to be the primordial
form of the fetish; this fetish takes the place of the natural
phenomenon, and is believed to be capable of exercising a direct
subjectivity which is vague but perfectly real.

We pass from this first form of fetish to the second, namely to the
veneration of objects, animals, plants, and the like, in which an
extrinsic power is supposed to be incarnated. Many ages elapsed before
man attained to this second stage of fetishism, since it was necessarily
preceded by a further and reflex elaboration of myth, namely, the
genesis of a belief in spirits.

Herbert Spencer and Tylor are among the writers who have given a
masterly description of this phase of the human intellect, and history
and ethnography have confirmed the accuracy of their researches and
conclusions. The shadow cast by a man's own body, the reflection of
images in the water, natural echoes, the reappearance of images of the
departed in dreams, the general instinct which leads man to vivify all
he sees, produced what may be called the reduplication of man in
himself, and the savage's primitive theory of the human soul. Originally
this soul was multiplied into all these natural phenomena, but it was
afterwards distributed by the mythical faculty into three, four, five,
or more powers, personifying the spirits. This belief in a multiplicity
of souls in man is not only still extant among more or less rude peoples
of the present day in Asia, Europe, Africa, America, and Polynesia, but
it is also the foundation of the belief of more civilized nations on the
subject, including our own Aryan race. Birch and others observe that the
Egyptians ascribed four spirits to man--Ba, Akba, Ka, and Khaba. The
Romans give three:

"Bis duo sunt homines, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra."

The same belief is found among nearly all savages. The Fijians
distinguish between the spirit which is buried with the dead man and
that more ethereal spirit which is reflected in the water and lingers
near the place where he died. The Malagasy believe in three souls, the
Algonquin in two, the Dakotan in three, the native of Orissa in four.

Since a fetish, strictly so called, is the incarnation of a power in
some given object, it must be preceded by this rude belief in spirits
and shades. Such a complex elaboration takes time,