external side is that the owner of the fetich alone has access {127} to it, alone can pray to it, alone can offer sacrifices to it. It is therefore in its inward essence directly destructive of the unity of interests and purposes that society demands and religion promotes. Perhaps it would be going too far to say that the practice of making prayers and offerings to a fetich is borrowed from religious worship: they are the natural and instinctive method of approaching any power which is capable of granting or refusing what we desire. It is the quarter to which they are addressed, and the end for which they are employed, that makes the difference between them. It is the fact that in the one case they are, and in the other are not, addressed to the quarter to which they ought to be addressed, and employed for the end for which they ought to be employed, that makes the difference in religious value between them. If we bear in mind the simple fact that fetichism is condemned by the religious and moral feelings of the communities in which it exists, we shall not fall into the mistake of regarding fetichism either as the primitive religion of mankind or as a stage of religious development or as "a basis from which many other modes of religious thought have been developed." {128} Professor Höffding, holding that fetichism is the primitive religion, out of which polytheism was developed, adopts Usener's theory as to the mode of its evolution. "The fetich," Professor Höffding says (p. 140), "is only the provisional and momentary dwelling-place of a spirit. As Hermann Usener has strikingly called it, it is 'the god of a moment.'" But though Professor Höffding adopts this definition of a fetich, it is obvious that the course of his argument requires us to understand it as subject to a certain limitation. His argument in effect is that fetichism is not polytheism, but something different, something out of which polytheism was evolved. And the difference is that polytheism means a plurality of gods, whereas fetichism knows no gods, but only spirits. Inasmuch then as, on the theory--whether it is held by Höffding or by anybody else--that the spirits of fetichism become the gods of polytheism, there must be differences between the spirits of the one and the gods of the other, let us enquire what the differences are supposed to be. First, there is the statement that a fetich is the "god of a moment," by which must be meant that the spirits which, so long as they are momentary and {129} temporary, are fetiches, must come to be permanent if they are to attain to the rank of gods.