"Exclusively habituated, for so long a time, to a theology eminently metaphysic, we must feel at present greatly embarrassed in our attempt to comprehend this gross primitive mode of thought. It is thus that fetishism has often been confounded with polytheism, when to the latter has been applied the common expression of idolatry, which strictly relates to the former only; since the priests of Jupiter or Minerva would, no doubt, have as justly repelled the vulgar reproach of worshipping images, as do the Catholic doctors of the present day a like unjust accusation of the Protestants. But though we are happily sufficiently remote from fetishism to find a difficulty in conceiving it, yet each one of us has but to retrace his own mental history, to detect the essential characters of this initial state. Nay, even eminent thinkers of the present day, when they allow themselves to be involuntarily ensnared (under the influence, but partially rectified, of a vicious education) to attempt to penetrate the mystery of the essential production of any phenomenon whose laws are not familiar to them, they are in a condition personally to exemplify this invariable instinctive tendency to trace the generation of unknown effects to a cause analogous to life, which is no other, strictly speaking, than the principle of fetishism.... "Theologic philosophy, thoroughly investigated, has always necessarily for its base pure fetishism, which deifies instantly each body and each phenomenon capable of exciting the feeble thought of infant humanity. Whatever essential transformations this primitive philosophy may afterwards undergo, a judicious sociological analysis will always expose to view this primordial base, never entirely concealed, even in a religious state the most remote from the original point of departure. Not only, for example, the Egyptian theocracy has presented, at the time of its greatest splendour, the established and prolonged coexistence, in the several castes of the hierarchy, of one of these religious epochs, since the inferior ranks still remained in simple fetishism, whilst the higher orders were in possession of a very remarkable polytheism, and the most exalted of its members had probably raised themselves to some form of monotheism; but we can at all times, by a strict scrutiny, detect in the theologic spirit traces of this original fetishism. It has even assumed, amongst subtle intelligences, the most metaphysical forms. What, in reality, is that celebrated conception of a soul of the world amongst the ancients, or that analogy, more modern, drawn between the earth and an immense living animal, and other similar fancies, but pure fetishism disguised in the pomp of