IN CENTRAL AFRICA AND ELSEWHERE. 



155 



of perturbation. Oh, yes," she said, " Maurice (her name for 

 the stick) may have done it. I know he often walks out that way ! " 



But would not this go to prove that the negro is religiously 

 in the child stage ? Not necessarily — he may be in his second 

 childhood, for old age has its hallucinations, as childhood its 

 imaginations. In any case Conte's definition is animism, not 

 fetichism. 



The French writer de Brosses in his work, Dii mite 

 des Dieux fetiches, 1760, understood by fetichism le culte 

 de certains objects terrestres et materiels," but this is idolatry, 

 which is ex hypothesi a higher stage again in the evolutionary 

 process. So this, too, is rather confusing. 



De Brosses excludes the worship of the heavenly bodies, and 

 I am sure he is right. But Comte joins issue with him, for he 

 gives prominence to the sun and moon as grands fetiches." 

 To him and his followers fetichism is practically " Nature 

 Worship," but another writer retorts that Nature Worship 

 is pure and noble compared with something ' irrationally rever- 

 enced.' " Herbert Spencer's view is radically different from 

 that of Comte. He maintains in his Sociology that a fetich is 

 " something unusual and inexplicable in appearance, in which the 

 spirit of a dead man has come to dwell." This is quite distinct 

 from Nature Worship. 



Goblet d'Alviella in his Hibbert lecture, p. 82, defines fetichism 

 as " the belief that the appropriation of a thing may secure the 

 services of the spirit lodged within it." 



This harmonizes strangely with a custom practised by the 

 native spiritists of the Dutch Indies. I heard of it first hand 

 from a Dutch gentleman, who had resided years in those parts 

 and had been himself a long time a spiritist medium. The Dutch 

 possessions are, he told me, honeycombed with spiritism. The 

 natives will take up some old man as a pensionnaire and feed and 

 lodge him gratis, on condition that he undertakes to become their 

 familiar spirit after death. At death a circular piece of bone is 

 cut out of the dead man's forehead, and when this is spun on 

 a piece of string, as schoolboys do buttons, the famihar spirit 

 is on its honour to respond to the call. Here we may say the 

 button or bone is the link between the living and the dead, 

 really a kind of fetich. 



I must not trouble you with many more definitions ; an 

 ounce of experience is worth a pound of definition — I will give 

 you only those of Webster and Littre. 



