By pursuing this theory, as we shall presently show more fully, the transition was easy to the incarnation of a spirit, whether that of a man or of some other being, into any object whatever, which was thereby invested with beneficent or malignant power. It is easy to show that in this second stage of fetishism, which some have believed to be the primitive form of myth, there would be no further progress in the mythical elaboration of spirits, their mode of life, their influence and possible transmigrations. This elaboration is indeed a product of the mythical faculty, but in a rational order; it is a logical process, mythical in substance, but purely reflective in form. For which reason it was impossible for animals to attain to this stage. Some peoples remained in this phase of belief, while others advanced to the ulterior and polytheistic form. This may also be divided into two classes; those who classify and ultimately reduce fetishes into a more general conception, and those whose conception takes an anthropomorphic form. Let us examine the genesis of both classes. When the popular belief in spirits had free development, the number of spirits and powers was countless, as many examples show. To give a single instance--the Australians hold that there is an innumerable multitude of spirits; the heavens, the earth, every nook, grove, bush, spring, crag, and stone are peopled with them. In the same way, some American tribes suppose the visible and invisible world to be filled with good and evil spirits; so do the Khonds, the Negroes of New Guinea, and, as Castren tells us, the Turanian tribes of Asia and Europe. Consequently, fetishes, which are the incarnation of these spirits in some object, animate or inanimate, natural or artificial, are innumerable, since primitive man and modern savages have created such fetishes, either at their own pleasure or with the aid of their priests, magicians, and sorcerers. Man's co-ordinating faculty, in those races which are capable of progressive evolution, does not stop short at this inorganic disintegration of things; he begins a process of classification and, at the same time, of reduction, by which the numerous fetishes are, by their natural points of likeness and unlikeness in character and form, reduced to types and classes, which, as we have already shown, comprise in themselves the qualities of all the particular objects of the same species which are diffused throughout nature. By this spontaneous process of human thought, due to the innate power of reasoning, man has gradually reduced the chaos of special fetishes to a tolerably systematic order, and he then goes on to more precise simplification. Let us try to trace in this historic fact the classifying process at the moment when the first form of polytheism succeeds to irregular and anarchical fetishism.