[Sidenote: Criticism of fetichism commonly a play on words.] The adoration of natural forces, conceived as more or less analogous to powerful living beings possessed of volition, has been denominated sometimes fetichism, sometimes naturism. Messrs. Müller and Spencer are agreed that fetichism is one of the later forms of religion, and decline to treat it as primitive. On both sides of this interesting discussion one desideratum seems to us to be beautifully conspicuous by its absence, namely, precision of formula and agreement as to the exact sense of terms. The words _fetich_, _animate being_, _inanimate being_, and so forth, seem to us to have given rise to a number of misunderstandings, on the part both of those who are defending the fetich theory and of those who are attacking it. Let us cite some examples: Max Müller has undertaken to define the word fetichism; as was natural for a philologist he went in search of an etymology, and he found, relying on Tylor, that fetichism (from the Portuguese _feitiço_, derived from the Latin _factitius_, _artificial_) could not designate anything but a superstitious reverence felt or shown for certain knick-knacks that possessed no apparent title to any such honourable distinction. The definition of Tylor and of Max Müller may be philologically exact; unhappily, none of the philosophers who have regarded fetichism as the basis of religion have ever employed that word in the narrow and rigorous sense which Max Müller puts upon it; they understood by it, as de Brosses and A. Comte did, the primitive tendency to conceive external objects as animated by a life analogous to that of man. They comprehended also, under the title of fetichism, what Max Müller distinguishes from it so carefully under the names of _physiolatry_, or the worship rendered to natural objects other than gimcracks, and of _zoolatry_, or the worship of animals. The result is that Max Müller’s refutations really do not concern the doctrine which they are designed to combat, and over against which he sets up his own doctrine. Similarly in regard to the definitions of M. Réville.[20] To demonstrate that a cult for knick-knacks is not the primitive and unique original of all human religions does not help us forward; the problem remains where it was. Let us consider, therefore, not the words, but the theory itself of the animation of nature, and let us examine the objections that have been urged against it.