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Updated: June 27, 2025
In front of every fact He has hung the impenetrable curtain of blasphemy. Now, then, all the little reason that poor man had is useless. To say anything against the priest was blasphemy and to say anything against God was blasphemy to ask a question was blasphemy. Finally we sank to the level of fetishism. We began to worship inanimate things.
There may be reactionary zeal of rabbis, priests, deacons, destructive to all healthful advance of thought; there may be a degeneration of worship into fetishism; there may be control by young Levites whose minds are only adequate to decide the colors of altar-cloths and the cut of man-millinery; there may be control by men of middle age who preach a gospel of "hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness"; there may be tyranny by old men who will allow no statements of belief save those which they learned as children.
The nymphaea, lotus or water-lily, forms rafts of verdure; and the stream-banks bear the calabash, the palmyra, the oil-palm, and the papyrus. Until late years it was supposed that the water-lily, sacred to Isis, had been introduced into Egypt from India, where it is also a venerated vegetable, and that it had died out with the form of Fetishism which fostered it.
But what is exactly the difference between fetishism and polytheism? No one now any longer holds that a fetish is regarded, by believers in fetish, as a material object and nothing more: everyone recognises that the material object to which the term is applied is regarded as the habitation of a spiritual being. The material object in question is to the fetish what the idol of a god is to a god.
The inexhaustible fecundity of Africa holds out to Europeans strong excitements to enterprise and research; but in the pursuit, the diseases which prevail in this country should be well understood; and it would be highly expedient, in any plans of colonization, to attach a medical staff, as the natives have no idea of the art of surgery, except what arises from the knowledge they have of the properties of herbs, and the superstitions attached to their fetishism.
The Christian Theist believes in a fall subsequent to the creation of man, and ascribes the ignorance and error, the superstition and idolatry which ensued, to the perversion and abuse of his intellectual and moral powers; M. Comte affirms that man did not fall, that he did actually rise by a process of slow but progressive self-elevation, and that, in advancing from Fetishism to Polytheism, and from Polytheism to Monotheism, and from Monotheism to Atheism, he has all along been determined by the law of his normal development.
A short stay at Moscow added to my Russian points of view, it being my second visit after an interval of nearly forty years. Although the city had spread largely, there was very little evidence of real progress: everywhere were filth, fetishism, beggary, and reaction.
He gives no historical evidence, however, of the prevalence of Fetishism in primitive times; that is an inference merely, depending partly on his theory of cerebral organization, and partly on the assumption that in the savage state, which is gratuitously supposed to have been the primitive condition of man, there must have been a tendency to regard every object, natural or artificial, as endowed with life and intelligence.
And the Fetishism, Ancestor-worship, Hero-worship, and Demonology of primitive savages are all, I believe, different manners of expression of their belief in ghosts, and of the anthropomorphic interpretation of out-of-the- way events which is its concomitant.
Is it altogether clear that in these our times men are not hampered, prevented to some degree from doing all the good they might do in the short life-time allotted to them, by doctrines of another kind? Is there in our day no undue sacrifice of present good in idle questionings? is there no tendency to trust in a vain fetishism to prevent or remove evils which energy could avert or remedy?
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