The realization of abstractions was not the embodiment of a
word, but the gradual disembodiment of a Fetish.
The primitive tendency or instinct of mankind is to assimilate all the
agencies which they perceive in Nature, to the only one of which they
are directly conscious, their own voluntary activity. Every object which
seems to originate power, that is, to act without being first visibly
acted upon, to communicate motion without having first received it, they
suppose to possess life, consciousness, will. This first rude conception
of nature can scarcely, however, have been at any time extended to all
phaenomena. The simplest observation, without which the preservation of
life would have been impossible, must have pointed out many uniformities
in nature, many objects which, under given circumstances, acted exactly
like one another: and whenever this was observed, men's natural and
untutored faculties led them to form the similar objects into a class,
and to think of them together: of which it was a natural consequence to
refer effects, which were exactly alike, to a single will, rather than
to a number of wills precisely accordant. But this single will could not
be the will of the objects themselves, since they were many: it must be
the will of an invisible being, apart from the objects, and ruling them
from an unknown distance.
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