III. Such is the theory of Mr. Spencer. And he would be right if the partisans of primitive fetichism understood by fetich, as he does, a material object at the heart of which the adorer imagines the existence of a mysterious agent _distinct from this object itself_. But is this notion of distinctness a necessary part, at least in the beginning, of fetichism, or, as one says to-day, of naturism? Imagine a rock which should detach itself unexpectedly from the mountain side, and roll down to the hut of a savage; it stops suddenly just as it is on the point of crushing his dwelling, it remains there pendent, menacing, to all appearance ready at an instant’s notice to begin rolling again; the savage fairly trembles at the sight of it. Do you believe that he needs really to suppose the presence of some foreign agent, of a soul, of an ancestral spirit in that stone to regard it as an object of fear and of respect? Not at all. It is the rock itself which constitutes his fetich, it is to the rock that he bows; he venerates it precisely because he is far from supposing it, as you do, essentially and eternally inert and passive; he ascribes to it possible intentions, a maleficent or beneficent will. He says to himself: “It is asleep to-day, but it was awake yesterday; yesterday it could have killed me, and it did not want to.” Let the lightning strike a savage’s hut three times in succession within a month, and he will easily recognize that the thunder is ill-disposed toward him and, quite without any preliminary need of personification in the way of endowing it with a departed soul, he will set about adoring the thunder and conjuring it not to do him harm. Mr. Spencer does not perceive that, at the very beginning of his exposition, he ascribes to primitive man a conception of nature analogous to the abstract mechanism of Descartes. Such a conception once pre-supposed, it is plain that to regard an object or a natural phenomenon as the centre of a cult, some new conception must be added to it, and this new conception may well be that of a spirit. Mr. Spencer, as he himself admits, looks upon fetichism as quite analogous to modern spiritualism, which sees in turning tables and oscillating chairs the work of disembodied souls; but nothing could be more arbitrary than this analogy. It is quite impossible that primitive man should stand in the same position that we do in the face of any natural phenomenon; as he does not possess the modern metaphysical idea of inert matter, he experiences no need to invent an indwelling spirit before he can ascribe volition to it. If a savage should see a table turn, he would say simply that the table was turning, no doubt, because it wanted to turn, and that, for him, would be the end of it; and if by chance it should be a matter of interest to him whether the table turned or not, it would immediately become a fetich to him. The conception of a fetich does not in the least presuppose, as Mr. Spencer