If such flights be reckoned possible for Christian kings and clerics in the Christian era, there would seem to be no unlikelihood about the many stories of God-beating and God-defying among contemporary savages, though so good an observer as Sir A. B. Ellis may not have witnessed them in the part of Africa best known to him. The conclusion reached by Sir A. B. Ellis is that the negroes of the Gold Coast are not properly to be described as fetishists. Fetishism, on his view, is a worship of objects as in themselves endowed with magical power; whereas the Gold Coast negro ascribes no virtue to the object commonly called his fetish, regarding it simply as inhabited by a supernatural power. This writer sees "true fetishism" in the attitude of Italian peasants and fishermen who beat and ill-treat their images when prayers are not answered, and in that of Spaniards who cover the faces of their images or turn them to the wall when about to do anything which they think the saint or deity would disapprove of. On this view, fetishism is a later yet lower stage of religious evolution than that of the negro. On the other hand, Miss Kingsley takes fetishism to be the proper name of the attitude of the negro towards particular objects as divinely inhabited, and represents it as a kind of pantheism (West African Studies, 2nd ed. 1901, ch. v). And since, by her definition, "Gods of fetish" do not necessarily "require a material object to manifest themselves in" (p. 96), the term "fetish" is thus detached from all of its former meanings. It seems expedient, as a matter of terminology, to let fetishism mean both object- or image-worship and the belief in the special inhabiting of objects by deities, with a recognition that the beliefs may be different stages in an evolution, though, on the other hand, they are obviously likely to coalesce or concur. In the "Obeah" system of the negroes of the West Indies the former belief in the indwelling spirit has become, or has coalesced with, belief in the magical powers of the object (Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 57).