Carlyle has said: “What notion each forms of the universe is the all-regulating fact with regard to him.” Looking out upon nature and knowing of no divine intelligence ever present and presiding, the African does not discover the reign of law nor the uniformity of nature. Those phenomena of which the cause is not as obvious as the effect he relates to a supernatural cause. And since _will_ is the cause that he knows by experience, he instinctively attributes natural phenomena to a personal will; not to _one_ will, however, but to many; for natural phenomena are various and the moods of nature are inconsistent. He hears the crash of thunder, and if he says, “Somebody threw something,” he is not very far from the ancient conception of Jupiter hurling thunderbolts. And, since that which is normal and regular does not attract attention like that which is unusual and fearful, therefore to the unreflecting mind the beneficence of nature is far less obvious than its terrors; since the laws of growth, seedtime and harvest, rain and sunshine,—all the kindly ministry of nature, is quiet and unobtrusive, while her cruelty thrusts itself upon the mind, the African concludes that the innumerable spirits which rule nature or constantly interfere with it are mostly evil and hostile. From this view it is not a long stride to the belief that the spirits reside _in_ the objects of nature, each in its appropriate object; and this is fetishism. We are all fetishists by instinct; though we may hear it with the astonishment of Molière’s hero when he found that he had been talking prose all his life. Every time one slams a door in anger or kicks at a bucket—as if such things had sentience and could be hurt—he exhibits a fetish instinct. If we bear in mind, then, that the very axioms of the African’s belief obliterate the line between nature and the supernatural, and, further, that habitual lying makes the character of truth vague and uncertain, and also that he has an imagination almost as vivid as reality, we may be somewhat enabled to understand the degraded mental condition indicated by such incidents as the following, which I repeat because they are representative: A certain woman, knowing that the penalty would be death, confessed—and with undoubted sincerity—that by witchcraft she had caused another woman’s death, and was herself killed by the people.