We pass from this first form of fetish to the second, namely to the veneration of objects, animals, plants, and the like, in which an extrinsic power is supposed to be incarnated.  Many ages elapsed before man attained to this second stage of fetishism, since it was necessarily preceded by a further and reflex elaboration of myth, namely, the genesis of a belief in spirits.

Herbert Spencer and Tylor are among the writers who have given a masterly description of this phase of the human intellect, and history and ethnography have confirmed the accuracy of their researches and conclusions.  The shadow cast by a man’s own body, the reflection of images in the water, natural echoes, the reappearance of images of the departed in dreams, the general instinct which leads man to vivify all he sees, produced what may be called the reduplication of man in himself, and the savage’s primitive theory of the human soul.  Originally this soul was multiplied into all these natural phenomena, but it was afterwards distributed by the mythical faculty into three, four, five, or more powers, personifying the spirits.  This belief in a multiplicity of souls in man is not only still extant among more or less rude peoples of the present day in Asia, Europe, Africa, America, and Polynesia, but it is also the foundation of the belief of more civilized nations on the subject, including our own Aryan race.  Birch and others observe that the Egyptians ascribed four spirits to man—­Ba, Akba, Ka, and Khaba.  The Romans give three: 

  “Bis duo sunt homines, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra.”

The same belief is found among nearly all savages.  The Fijians distinguish between the spirit which is buried with the dead man and that more ethereal spirit which is reflected in the water and lingers near the place where he died.  The Malagasy believe in three souls, the Algonquin in two, the Dakotan in three, the native of Orissa in four.

Since a fetish, strictly so called, is the incarnation of a power in some given object, it must be preceded by this rude belief in spirits and shades.  Such a complex elaboration takes time, since it involves a previous creation of powers, spirits or the shades of men; these lead to the belief in independent spirits of various origin, which people the heavens and all parts of the world.  Hence arose the belief in transmigration, the necessary prelude to the theory of the incarnation, which was ultimately constituted by fetishism.  The comparative study of languages shows that including the Aryan and Semitic races, the belief in spirits was developed in all peoples, and in all of them we also find a belief in the transmigration of souls.