A more advanced stage in the history of fetichism is that which is reached by reflection on the fact that a fetich not unfrequently ceases to prosper the undertakings of its possessor in the way he expected it to do. On the principles of animism, everything that is--whether animate, or inanimate according to our notions--is made up of spirit, or soul, and body. In the case of man, when he dies, the spirit leaves the body. When, therefore, a fetich ceases to act, the explanation by analogy is that the spirit has left the body, the inanimate, with which it was originally associated; and when that is the case, then, as we learn from Miss Kingsley (_Travels in West Africa_, pp. 304-305), "the little thing you kept the spirit in is no more use now, and only fit to sell to a white man as 'a big curio.'" The fact that, in native belief, what we call an inanimate thing may lose its soul and become really dead is shown by Miss Kingsley in a passage quoted by Dr. Haddon: "Everything that he," the native, "knows by means of his senses he regards as a twofold entity--part spirit, part not spirit, or, as we should say, matter; the connection of a certain spirit with a certain mass of matter, he holds, is not permanent. He will point out to you a lightning-struck tree, and tell {119} you its spirit has been broken; he will tell you when the cooking-pot has been broken, that it has lost its spirit" (_Folk-Lore_, VIII, 141). We might safely infer then that as any object may lose its spirit, so too may an object which has been chosen as a fetich; even if we had not, as we have, direct testimony to the belief.