ignorant and superstitious with real savage faith in their mysterious virtues, by the more enlightened in quaint survival from the past. The mental and physical phenomena of what is now called 'table-turning' belong to a class of proceedings which have here been shown to be familiar to the lower races, and accounted for by them on a theory of extra-human influence which is in the most extreme sense spiritualistic.
In giving its place in the history of mental development to the doctrine of the lower races as to embodiment in or penetration of an object by a spirit or an influence, there is no slight interest in comparing it with theories familiar to the philosophy of cultured nations. Thus Bishop Berkeley remarks on the obscure expressions of those who have described the relation of power to the objects which exert it. He cites Torricelli as likening matter to an enchanted vase of Circe serving as a receptacle of force, and declaring that power and impulse are such subtle abstracts and refined quintessences, that they cannot be enclosed in any other vessels but the inmost materiality of natural solids; also Leibnitz as comparing active primitive power to soul or substantial form. Thus, says Berkeley, must even the greatest men, when they give way to abstraction, have recourse to words having no certain signification, and indeed mere scholastic shadows.[1] We may fairly add that such passages show the civilized metaphysician falling back on such primitive conceptions as still occupy the minds of the rude natives of Siberia and Guinea. To go yet farther, I will venture to assert that the scientific conceptions current in my own schoolboy days, of heat and electricity as invisible fluids passing in and out of solid bodies, are ideas which reproduce with extreme closeness the special doctrine of Fetishism.
Under the general heading of Fetishism, but for convenience' sake separately, may be considered the worship of 'stocks and stones.' Such objects, if merely used as
- ↑ Berkeley, 'Concerning Motion,' in 'Works,' vol. ii. p. 86.
