since it involves a
previous creation of powers, spirits or the shades of men; these lead to
the belief in independent spirits of various origin, which people the
heavens and all parts of the world. Hence arose the belief in
transmigration, the necessary prelude to the theory of the incarnation,
which was ultimately constituted by fetishism. The comparative study of
languages shows that including the Aryan and Semitic races, the belief
in spirits was developed in all peoples, and in all of them we also find
a belief in the transmigration of souls.

The transmigration of the human soul was first believed to take place in
the body of a new-born child, since at the moment of death the soul of
the dying person entered into the foetus. The Algonquins buried the
corpses of their children by the wayside, so that their souls might
easily enter into the bodies of the pregnant women who passed that way.
Some of the North American tribes believed that the mother saw in a
dream the dead relation who was to imprint his likeness on her unborn
child. At Calabar, when the mother who has lost a child gives birth to
another, she believes that the dead child is restored to her. The
natives of New Guinea believe that a son who greatly resembles his dead
father has inherited his soul. Among the Yorubas the new-born child is
greeted with the words: "Thou hast returned at last!" The same ideas
prevail among the Lapps and Tartars, as well as among the negroes of the
West Coast of Africa. Among the aborigines of Australia the belief is
widely diffused that those who die as black return as white men.

Primitive and ignorant peoples perceive no precise distinction between
man and brutes, so that, as Tylor observes, they readily accept the
belief of the transmigration of the human soul into an animal, and then
into inanimate objects, and this belief culminates in the incarnation of
the true fetish. Among some of the North American tribes the spirits of
the dead are supposed to pass into bears. An Eskimo widow refused to eat
seal's flesh because she supposed that her husband's soul had migrated
into that animal. Others have imagined that the souls of the dead passed
into birds, beetles, and other insects, according to their social rank
when still alive. Some African tribes believe that the dead migrate into
certain species of apes.

By pursuing this theory, as we shall presently show more fully, the
transition was easy to the incarnation of a sp