individual, so the material object and its occupying spirit or power
form one individual, more vague, perhaps, but still with many
attributes distinctively human. It possesses personality and will ...
it possesses most of the human passions,--anger, revenge, also
generosity and gratitude; it is within reach of influence and may be
benevolent, hence to be deprecated and placated, and its aid enlisted."

{118}

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
fetic