as well as the psychical image which corresponds to them, is not content
with this normal and fugitive effect of apprehending the personified
object presented to him. The psychical image of his actual perception,
which he has ascertained from experience to be beneficent or malignant,
or which has been interpreted as such by his fancy, recurs to the mind
even when it is absent and remote, and it recurs in the vivid and
personified form in which it was first perceived.

Hence come the following psychical facts. On the one side the actual
object which he has assumed to be invested with the faculty of will
still remains to exert the same external influence; on the other, its
personified image is also present to his mind, so that he can regard it
with the vivid quickness of the fancy, and invest it, by its manifold
relations to other and various phenomena, with efficacy, force, and
mysterious purposes. It follows from this inward action and emotion that
while in the case of animals the beneficent or malignant object is only
invested with life at the moment of perception, and has no more efficacy
after its disappearance, man on the contrary retains the same
personified object in his memory, and recalls it at pleasure, so that
its special efficacy persists, and it continues to be the object of
hopes and fears either in the past or in the future. In a word, the
natural myth of animals is transformed by man into a fetish, whether
this object or its corresponding image in his mind be superstitiously
regarded as good or evil, pleasing or terrible.

This was the source of primitive, confused, and inorganic fetishism
among all peoples; namely, that they ascribed intentional and conscious
life to a host of natural objects and phenomena. Hence came the fears,
the adoration, the guardianship of, or abhorrence for some given species
of stones, plants, animals, some strange forms or unusual natural