When the popular belief in spirits had free development, the number of spirits and powers was countless, as many examples show.  To give a single instance—­the Australians hold that there is an innumerable multitude of spirits; the heavens, the earth, every nook, grove, bush, spring, crag, and stone are peopled with them.  In the same way, some American tribes suppose the visible and invisible world to be filled with good and evil spirits; so do the Khonds, the Negroes of New Guinea, and, as Castren tells us, the Turanian tribes of Asia and Europe.  Consequently, fetishes, which are the incarnation of these spirits in some object, animate or inanimate, natural or artificial, are innumerable, since primitive man and modern savages have created such fetishes, either at their own pleasure or with the aid of their priests, magicians, and sorcerers.

Man’s co-ordinating faculty, in those races which are capable of progressive evolution, does not stop short at this inorganic disintegration of things; he begins a process of classification and, at the same time, of reduction, by which the numerous fetishes are, by their natural points of likeness and unlikeness in character and form, reduced to types and classes, which, as we have already shown, comprise in themselves the qualities of all the particular objects of the same species which are diffused throughout nature.

By this spontaneous process of human thought, due to the innate power of reasoning, man has gradually reduced the chaos of special fetishes to a tolerably systematic order, and he then goes on to more precise simplification.  Let us try to trace in this historic fact the classifying process at the moment when the first form of polytheism succeeds to irregular and anarchical fetishism.

In the Samoan islands, a local god is wont to appear in the form of an owl, and the accidental discovery of a dead owl would be deplored, and its body would be buried with solemn rites.  The death of this particular bird does not, however, imply the death of the god himself, since the people believe him to be incarnated in the whole species.  In this fact we see that a special fetish is developed into a specific form; thus a permanent type is evolved from special appearances.

Acosta has handed down to us another belief of the comparatively civilized Peruvians, which recalls the primitive genesis of their mythical ideas.  He says that the shepherds used to adore various stars, to which they assigned the names of animals; stars which protected men against the respective animals after whom they were called.  They held the general belief that all animals whatever had a representative in heaven, which watched over their reproduction, and of which they were, so to speak, the essence.  This affords another example of the more general extension and classification, and, at the same time, of the reduction of the original multitude of fetishes.