maintains, the conception of a soul; there is no such metaphysical element in fetichism, and it is precisely on that account that this form of religion must have preceded spiritism, which is always founded on a more or less rudimentary metaphysics. [Sidenote: For savages and children nature a society.] For animals and savages, as for very young children, nature is absolutely the opposite of what it appears to be nowadays to the scholar and the philosopher: for them it is not a cold and neuter habitat, in which man alone possesses aims and bends everything to the fulfilment of his wishes; it is not a physical laboratory full of inert instruments for the service of man. On the contrary, nature is a society; primitive people see intention in everything. Friends or enemies surround them on all sides; the struggle for existence is one long pitched battle with imaginary allies against adversaries not infrequently only too real. How should they understand that there is a profound unity in nature which rigidly excludes from the chain of things anything like individuality or independence? The only cause of movement with which they are acquainted is desire; they reckon desire or intention as the cause of every movement in nature, as of every movement in their fellow-men and in animals; and they conceive that the intentions of all of the diverse beings by which they find themselves surrounded may be equally modified by prayer and offerings. Their conception of nature is at once anthropomorphic and sociomorphic, as is subsequently their conception of God. Nothing is more natural and inevitable than this fashion of modeling the external world on the internal, and the relations of things on the relations of men. [Sidenote: Panthelism.] If the word fetichism is too vague to designate this primitive state of mind and gives rise to confusion, take another word; if the word _panthelism_ were not a little barbarous it would better express this stage of human intelligence in which one is inclined to ascribe to all the phenomena of nature not indeed souls, as distinct from bodies, but simply intentions, desires, volitions, as naturally inhering in the objects themselves. [Sidenote: English classification of things.]