(_d_) That whatever is much used in ritual, especially if often addressed in spells or incantations, should become an object of reverence, apt to be personified and raised to, or even above, the human level as a conscious agent: for example, padi and rice in Indonesia, the ordeal tree on the Congo, already mentioned. Fire-sticks used in the ritual of sacrifice are often deified. In India, the conch, having for ages been used in religious rites, “the people gradually came to revere the instrument itself and to adore and invoke it.”[172] “A strange religious feature [of the _Rigveda_] pointing to a remote antiquity is the occasional deification and worship even of objects fashioned by the hand of man, when regarded as useful to him. These are chiefly sacrificial implements.”[173] The practice now extends in India to nearly every tool and utensil. Amongst the very few inanimate gods of the Cherokees are the Stone, invoked by the Shaman when seeking lost goods by means of a pebble suspended by a string; and the Flint, invoked when about to scarify a patient with an arrow-head before rubbing in medicine.[174] By the Apache, heddontin (pollen of the cat-tail rush) is used as the sacrificial powder in nearly all rites, and is personified and prayed to.[175] When spells are addressed to any object, the analogy of address to human beings tends to cause that object to be thought of as humanly conscious. (_e_) Stocks and stones have been worshipped, as the dwelling-place of spirits in many parts of the world; having superseded in the mind of their devotees the ghost of the men whose burial-place they formerly marked, but who themselves have been forgotten; and probably, on the analogy of these stones, others that no ghost ever haunted. (_f_) Where Animism is active amongst a timid and suspicious people, whatever injures a man is believed to act of malice: as amongst the Indians of Guiana, who are so timid that rather than go hunting alone they will take a woman or a child along with them.[176] Under such conditions as these a sort of acquired psychological Animism is very widely though very irregularly diffused; but were it universal and uniform, it could not of itself account for hyperphysical Animism—the doctrine that men (or some men), some animals, plants, things, places, are possessed or informed by spirits that are capable of separate existence. § 3. THE GHOST THEORY