hism. That law is that a fetich is an object believed to aid its
possessor in attaining the end he desires. In the earliest stage of
its history anything which happens to arrest a man's attention when he
is in a state of expectancy "is involuntarily associated with what is
about to happen," and so becomes a fetich. In the most developed stage
of fetichism, men are not content to wait until they stumble across a
fetich, and when they do so to say, "Ha! ha! art thou there?" Their
mental attitude becomes {120} interrogative: "Ha! ha! where art thou?"
They no longer wait to stumble across a fetich, they proceed to make
one; and for that procedure a belief in the transmigration of spirits
is essential. An object, a habitation for the spirit, is prepared; and
he is invited, conjured, or conjured, into it. If he is conjured into
it, the attitude of the man who invites him is submissive; if conjured,
the mental attitude of the performer is one of superiority. Colonel
Ellis throughout all his careful enquiries found that "so great is the
fear of giving possible offence to any superhuman agent" that (in the
region of his observation) we may well believe that even the makers of
fetiches did not assume to command the spirits. But elsewhere, in
other regions, it is impossible to doubt but that the owners of
fetiches not only conjure the spirits into the objects, but also apply
coercion to them when they fail to aid their possessor in the
accomplishment of his wishes. That, I take it, is the ultimate stage
in the evolution, the fine flower, of fetichism. And it is not
religion, it has no value as religion, or rather its value is
anti-religious. Even if we were to accept as a definition of religion
that it is the conciliation of beings conceived to be superior, we
should be compelled by {121} the definition to say that fetichism in
its eventual outcome is not religion, for the attitude of the owner
towards his fetich is then one of superiority, and his method is, when
conciliation fails, to apply coercion.

But it may perhaps be argued that fetichism, except in what I have
termed its ultimate evolution, is religion and has religious value; or,
to put it otherwise, that what I have represented as the eventual
outcome is really a perversion or the decline of fetichism. Then, in
the fetichism which is or represents the primitive religion of mankind
we meet, according to Professor Hoeffding, "religion under the guise of
desire