The men of modern times have shown that they have the critical faculty more highly developed, and their investigations have dealt more with practical matters. In the eighteenth century, writers, historians and philosophers--Voltaire amongst the number--wishing to know how the phenomenon of mental religion appeared in the world, collected all the data to be obtained from travellers concerning savages; they found that without exception all believed in occult powers, as distinct from material or human forces, and doubted not the efficacy of certain magic arts in use amongst them to attract these powers to themselves, and to constrain them to act on their behalf. Judging by analogy these writers contend that primitive man, doubtless impressed by the alarming phenomena of nature, would make search for the unknown beings around him, whom the storms, the thunders and the lightnings obey, but these beings were invisible, consequently there must be an invisible world in communication with the visible or human world. In this way were the beliefs of the present-day savages supposed to be those current at the dawn of religious conceptions of humanity. The ignorance of a subject, of whatever nature, has never prevented the laying down of axioms concerning that subject. Towards the end of the eighteenth century some Portuguese navigators, who never embarked without providing themselves with talisman and amulet,--to protect them during their voyages,--which they called _feitiços_, seeing some negroes of the Gold Coast prostrating themselves with every appearance of reverence, before bones, stones, or the tails of some animals, concluded at once without further investigation that these were considered as divinities by the negroes; and on their return to their native land, they spread the report that savage races worshipped _feitiços_. This word _feitiços_ corresponds to the Latin _factitius_, meaning that which is made by hand, as the amulets were which belonged to the Portuguese sailors. The well-known President de Brosses used the name and promulgated the idea, and without having set foot on countries inhabited by negroes, composed and published a book on their fetishes. In this manner the French language was enriched in 1760 by the new word fetish. All this seemed so natural and plausible that the word, and the idea of the adoration of fetishes became quite general; the theory of the worship of fetishes penetrated rapidly, and took deep root in the public mind, it found its way very readily into school books and manuals, and we were taught that the religion of savages consists solely in the worship of fetishes, and learned writers draw the conclusion that fetishism must necessarily have been the primitive religion of humanity.