Of course, the belief we extend to such narratives is entirely conditioned by our knowledge of the personal character of the performers.  The point here is merely the civilised and savage practice of automatism, the apparent eliciting of knowledge not otherwise accessible, by the movements of a stick, or a bit of wood.  These movements, made without conscious exertion or direction, seem, to savage philosophy, to be caused by in-dwelling spirits, the sources of Fetishism.

These examples, then, demonstrating unconscious movement of objects by the operators, make it clear that movements even of touched objects, may be attributed, by some civilised and by savage amateurs, to ‘spirits.’  The objects so moved may, by savages, be regarded in some cases as fetishes, and their movements may have helped to originate the belief that spirits can inhabit inanimate objects.  When objects apparently quite untouched become volatile, the mystery is deeper.  This apparent animation and frolicsome behaviour of inanimate objects is reported all through history, and attested by immense quantities of evidence of every degree.  It would be tedious to give a full account of the antiquity and diffusion of reports about such occurrences.  We find them among Neo-Platonists, in the English and Continental Middle Ages, among Eskimo, Hurons, Algonkins, Tartars, Zulus, Malays, Nasquapees, Maoris, in witch trials, in ancient Peru (immediately after the Spanish Conquest), in China, in modern Russia, in New England (1680), all through the career of modern spiritualism, in Hayti (where they are attributed to ’Obeah’), and, sporadically, everywhere.[12]

Among all these cases, we must dismiss whatever the modern paid medium does in the dark.  The only thing to be done with the ethnographic and modern accounts of such marvels is to ‘file them for reference.’  If a spontaneous example occurs, under proper inspection, we can then compare our old tales.  Professor James says:  ’Their mutual resemblances suggest a natural type, and I confess that till these records, or others like them, are positively explained away, I cannot feel (in spite of such vast amounts of detected frauds) as if the case of physical mediumship itself, as a freak of nature, were definitely closed....  So long as the stories multiply in various lands, and so few are positively explained away, it is bad method to ignore them.’[13] Here they are not ignored, because, whatever the cause or causes of the phenomena, they would buttress, if they did not originate, the savage belief in spirits tenanting inanimate matter, whence came Fetishism.  As to facts, we cannot, of course, ’explain away’ events of this kind, which we know only through report.  A conjurer cannot explain a trick merely from a description, especially a description by a non-conjurer.  But, as a rule, nothing so much leads to doubt on this theme as the ‘explanation’ given—­except, of course, in the case of ’dark seances’ got up and prepared by paid mediums.  We know, sometimes, how the ‘explanation’ arose.