De Brosses did not look among civilised fetishists for the motives which
he neglected among savages (i. 196). Tant pis pour monsieur le
President. But we and our method no more stand or fall with De Brosses
and his, than Mr. Max Muller's etymologies stand or fall with those in
the Cratylus of Plato. If, in a civilised people, ancient or modern, we
find a practice vaguely styled 'fetishistic,' we examine it in its
details. While we have talismans, amulets, gamblers' fetiches, I do not
think that, except among some children, we have anything nearly analogous
to Gold Coast fetishism as a whole. Some one seems to have called the
palladium a fetish. I don't exactly know what the palladium (called a
fetish by somebody) was. The hasta fetialis has been styled a fetish--an
apparent abuse of language. As to the Holy Cross qua fetish, why discuss
such free-thinking credulities?
Modern anthropologists--Tylor, Frazer, and the rest--are not under the
censure appropriate to the illogical.