ent of them in explanation is to us
evidently, as M. Comte says, the naif reproduction of the phaenomenon
as the reason for itself: but it was not so in the beginning. The
metaphysical point of view was not a perversion of the positive, but a
transformation of the theological. The human mind, in framing a class of
objects, did not set out from the notion of a name, but from that of a
divinity. The realization of abstractions was not the embodiment of a
word, but the gradual disembodiment of a Fetish.

The primitive tendency or instinct of mankind is to assimilate all the
agencies which they perceive in Nature, to the only one of which they
are directly conscious, their own voluntary activity. Every object which
seems to originate power, that is, to act without being first visibly
acted upon, to communicate motion without having first received it, they
suppose to possess life, consciousness, will. This first rude conception
of nature can scarcely, however, have been at any time extended to all
phaenomena. The simplest observation, without which the preservation of
life would have been impossible, must have pointed out many uniformities
in nature, many objects which, under given circumstances, acted exactly
like one another: and whenever this was observed, men's natural and
untutored faculties led them to form the similar objects into a class,
and to think of them together: of which it was a natural consequence to
refer effects, which were exactly alike, to a single will, rather than
to a number of wills precisely accordant. But this single will could not
be the will of the objects themselves, since they were many: it must be
the will of an invisible being, apart from the objects, and ruling them
from an unknown distance. This is Polytheism. We are not aware that in
any tribe of savages or negroes who have been observed, Fetichism has
been found totally unmixed with Polytheism, and it is probable that the
two coexisted from the earliest period at which the human mind was
capable of forming objects into classes. Fetichism proper gradually
becomes limited to objects possessing a marked individuality. A
particular mountain or river is worshipped bodily (as it is even now by
the Hindoos and the South Sea Islanders) as a divinity in itself, not
the mere residence of one, long after invisible gods have been imagined
as rulers of all the great classes of phaenomena, even intellectual and
moral, as war, love, wisdom, beauty, &c. T