FETICHISM OR ANTHROPOMORPHISM. 519 



whom articulate speech was but just beginning to emerge from inar- 

 ticulate noises and gestures. Even if, then, it were admitted, as 

 Chauncey Wright suggested, that the notion of "will" and "per- 

 sonality " arose primarily from the objective observation of other 

 men, since those ideas involve abstraction, it is yet unscientific to as- 

 sert that the attitude of primitive men toward the universe was in 

 any sense anthropomorphic. 



Dream-spirits and ghosts may, indeed, have been the earliest the- 

 ory to account, in a semi-scientific way, for cosmical movements and 

 events; but, from an historical point of view, it would seem that phe- 

 nomena must have been wondered at, and half -unconsciously classified, 

 long before there was any attempt at any even partly coherent expla- 

 nation of them. To prehistoric men the world must have seemed for 

 ages, if the theory of evolution is accepted, as a mysterious jumble of 

 half-living creatures, until it became partly intelligible as the theatre 

 of the operation of a multitude of spirits. During those remote ages 

 these strange creatures would themselves be the only possible objects 

 of worship — and such worship would be properly termed fetichism — 

 it could most certainly not be termed anthropomorphism or spiritism. 

 Spiritism, when, with increasing intelligence and reasoning powers, 

 it first began to be suggested, would have seemed almost like the 

 revelation of a new religion, or like the discovery of a new scientific 

 truth ; older forms and notions would be retained, but with new mean- 

 ings and new explanations, and the original meanings and explanations 

 would be soon forgotten ; but the beginnings of religion, unless the 

 principle of continuity is discarded, must be sought for in the inco- 

 herent and fetichistic fancies that animism supplanted. There is some 

 reason for believing that in recent times some such change from a sim- 

 ple analogical fetichism to animism has taken place among the Zunis. 

 It is asserted, for instance, that until lately they conceived of a bow 

 as akin to a beast of prey, but that now they speak of it as inhabited 

 or directed by the spirit of a deceased warrior. 



The argument may now be summed up briefly as follows : Feti- 

 chism would naturally result from the simple objective observation 

 and elementary analogical methods of reasoning that must have been 

 characteristic of primitive men. Anthropomorphism involves a power 

 of subjective introspection and of abstract thinking that can not have 

 been possessed by primitive men. Between the earliest anthropomor- 

 phic conceptions of the universe of which we have record, and the 

 simplest possible attitude toward the universe that could be described 

 as in a rudimentary form religious, there must have been a long period 

 of evolution — a period that may well have been measured by thousands 

 of years — during which there may have been an indefinite number of 

 gradations of religious sentiment and theory. During that period, then, 

 there must have been some stages of thought, as an essential condition 

 in the evolution of anthropomorphism, from the mild-eyed, incurious 



