Animism

“ And by animism I do not mean the theory of a soul in nature, but the tendency or impulse or instinct, in which all myth originates, to animate all things; the projection of ourselves into nature; the sense and apprehension of an intelligence like our own but more powerful in all visible things. ”

“ In accordance with this view, animism may be described as the distinctive philosophy of primitive culture. It is manifestly the outcome and development of that earliest analogical reasoning, which concludes external objects to be animated with a life essentially similar to our own ”

“ But if we look still deeper, we discover as background to the myths and the social psychology a profound animism. This animism appears in its own environment in the shading away of the different fairy-like beings into spirits and ghosts of the departed. ”

“ Animism thus conceived is, it is obvious, too complex and elaborate to be really primitive. It appears to be itself derived from a simpler and earlier conception, whereby man attributes to all the objects of external nature life and personality. In other words, the external world is first interpreted by the savage thinker in the terms of his own consciousness; animism, or the distinction of soul and body, is a development necessitated by subsequent observation and the train of reasoning which that observation awakens. ”

“ In the later, maturer development of animism, after it has been defined through the process of anthropomorphic elaboration, when its application has been limited in a somewhat consistent fashion to the remote and the invisible, it comes about that an increasing range of everyday facts are provisionally accounted for without recourse to the preternatural agency in which a cultivated animism expresses itself. ”

“ The most significant difference between men and animals is not found in the fact that animals may be unable to interpret animistically certain striking natural phenomena—an opinion open to question—but in their inability to fix by means of communicable signs any fleeting animistic interpretation which might chance to cross their mind. Without the advantage conferred by speech, upon even the lowest savages, to hold, clarify, keep alive, and bring to fruition impressions of this evanescent nature, I do not see how a stable belief in animism could have been established. ”

“ In the philosophy of Animism, and in the belief of many peoples, savage and civilised, spirits of the dead, or spirits at large, can take up their homes in the bodies of living men. Such men, or women, are spoken of as 'inspired,' or 'possessed.' They speak in voices not their own, they act in a manner alien to their natural character, they are said to utter prophecies, and to display knowledge which they could not have normally acquired, and, in fact, do not consciously possess, in their normal condition. ”

“ From this conception, then, animism may reasonably be supposed to have had its origin, especially as other animistic doctrines exhibit such a distinct affinity and relationship to this of the apparitional soul, as almost amounts to a proof of direct derivation from it. The hypothesis being correct, it would, for instance, follow that the lower animals ought to be considered as having souls similar to human souls, inasmuch as they have life, and their phantoms are likewise seen. ”

“ Animism is a system of thought, it gives not only the explanation of a single phenomenon, but makes it possible to comprehend the totality of the world from one point, as a continuity. Writers maintain that in the course of time three such systems of thought, three great world systems came into being: the animistic (mythological) , the religious, and the scientific. Of these animism, the first system is perhaps the most consistent and the most exhaustive, and the one which explains the nature of the world in its entirety. This first world system, of mankind is now a psychological theory. ”

“ This doctrine of Animism will be considered elsewhere as affecting philosophy and religion, but here we have only to do with its bearing on mythology. To the lower tribes of man, sun and stars, trees and rivers, winds and clouds, become personal animate creatures, leading lives conformed to human or animal analogies, and performing their special functions in the universe with the aid of limbs like beasts or of artificial instruments like men ”

“ A simple animism gives to men their first conceptions. The child projects the life which animates him; he endows the things around him with a personality similar to his own. For him there is nothing dead or inert; the world is peopled with living beings with which he contends, and talks, and is angry, to which he gives his love and his caresses. ”

“ Magic, the technique of animism, clearly and unmistakably shows the tendency of forcing the laws of psychic life upon the reality of things, under conditions where spirits did not yet have to play any role, and could still be taken as objects of magic treatment. The assumptions of magic are therefore of older origin than the spirit theory, which forms the nucleus of animism. ”

“ Indirectly, the progress of mental culture, both in learning and in æsthetics, has depended almost entirely on the development of Animism; and this in turn has depended on the aid which Animism gave to government and to the extension of law and order, however imperfect, over wide regions of the earth. This is the fundamental utility which, first, Magic and, afterwards, Animism subserve, and for the sake of which—unconsciously, of course—they arise and prevail. Mankind has been subdued through imagination ”

“ Animism in the narrower sense is the theory of psychic concepts and in the wider sense, of spiritual beings in general. Animatism, the animation theory of seemingly inanimate nature, is a further subdivision which also includes animatism and animism. ”

“ Yet animism is still plainly to be traced onward from the intellectual state of the lower races, along the course of the higher culture, whether its doctrines have been continued and modified into the accepted philosophy of religion, or whether they have dwindled into mere survivals in popular superstition. ”

“ Of the origin of animism perhaps no perfect account has yet been given, It can hardly be said to be obvious why, in uncultured races or individuals, there should arise that invariable tendency to represent natural forces as conscious and anthropomorphic. ”

“ This has been done in so many other volumes of this series and in such detail that it is sufficient to state here succinctly that animism is a condition of thought or belief in which man considers everything in the universe along with himself to be the possessor of 'soul,' 'spirit,' or at least volition. ”

“ Animism, vitalism, and monism are, in reality, different ways of looking at them. They are the different answers to this question:—Are vital, psychic, and physico-chemical manifestations essentially distinct? Vitalists distinguish be [Pg 6] tween life and thought, animists identify them. In the opposite camp mechanicians, materialists, or monists make the same mistake as the animists, but to that mistake they add another: they assimilate the forces at play in animals and plants to the general forces of the universe; they confuse all three—soul, life, inanimate nature. ”

“ Even if, as some among us may venture to think, the original definition of Animism is wide enough to include the conception of that feeling of awe and mystery in face of the powers and potencies which lie at the back of both religion and magic, at the same time the new definition provides us with a useful method of reclassifying some phases of primitive belief. ”

“ Animism is, in fact, the groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion, from that of savages up to that of civilized men. And although it may at first sight seem to afford but a bare and meagre definition of a minimum of religion, it will be found practically sufficient; for where the root is, the branches will generally be produced. It is habitually found that the theory of Animism divides into two great dogmas, forming parts of one consistent doctrine ”

“ We may find in the magical texts survivals from the primeval age of animism, if only we know how to interpret them rightly, for the religious conceptions of a later age we shall look in vain. They offer us magic and not religion, the wizard or witch and not the priest. ”

“ But it is difficult in practice to distinguish the two phases of thought and no clear account of animatism can yet be given, largely on the ground that no people has yet been discovered which has not already developed to a greater or less extent an animistic philosophy. On theoretical grounds it is probable that animatism preceded animism; but savage thought is no more consistent than that of civilized man ”

“ And thus Animism, starting as a philosophy of human life, extended and expanded itself till it became a philosophy of nature at large.
To the minds of the lower races it seems that all nature is possessed, pervaded, crowded, with spiritual beings. In seeking by a few types to give an idea of this conception of pervading Spirits in its savage and barbaric stage, it is not indeed possible to draw an absolute line of separation between spirits occupied in affecting for good and ill the life of Man, and spirits specially concerned in carrying on the operations of Nature. ”

“ For the primitive man the laws of the waking world are not yet widely differentiated from the laws of the sleeping world, and he finds it not unreasonable to seek illumination for the problems of one world in the phenomena of the other. The doctrine of animism, as first formulated by Tylor (more especially in his Primitive Culture) finds in dreams the chief source of primitive religion and philosophy. Of recent years there has been a tendency to reject the theory of animism. ”

“ The primitive philosophy of animism involves the ascription of all phenomena to personal agencies. As phenomena are good or evil, produce pleasure or pain, cause weal or woe, a distinction in the character of these agencies is gradually recognized; the agents of good become gods, those of evil, demons. ”

“ Development of Animism.—If the phenomena of dreams were, as suggested above, of great importance for the development of animism, the belief, which must originally have been a doctrine of human psychology, cannot have failed to expand speedily into [v.02 p.0054] a general philosophy of nature. Not only human beings but animals and objects are seen in dreams ”

“ One may interpret the facts at discretion: an animist may accept them literally and seriously; a devotee of Magic may regard decrees in the Pekin Gazette as spells that have coercive power in the spirit-world; a Confucian mandarin will think that an excellent plan has been devised for enlisting the superstitions of the simple-minded in support of law and order. We may suppose that for him Animism is but an episode in the history of human thought. ”

“ To say that animism is the general principle of myth does not reduce the different sources whence it proceeds to a single psychical and organic [Pg 18] act, since they remain distinct and separate in their respective orbits. To attain our object, it is necessary that the direct personification of natural phenomena, as well as the indirect personification of metaphor; the infusion of life into a man's own shadow, into reflex images and dreams; the belief in the reality of normal illusions, as well as of the abnormal hallucinations of delirium, of madness, and of all forms of nervous affections ”

“ While magic still retains the full omnipotence of ideas, animism has ceded part of this omnipotence to spirits and thus has started on the way to form a religion. Now what could have moved primitive man to this first act of renunciation? It could hardly have been an insight into the incorrectness of his assumptions, for he continued to retain the magic technique.
As pointed out elsewhere, spirits and demons were nothing but the projection of primitive man’s emotional impulses ”

“ The earliest forms were those which we call fetishism and animism. In fetishism the wind that blows a tree down is endowed with personality and supposed to exert conscious effort; in animism some ghost of a dead man is animating that gust of wind. In either case a conscious volition similar to our own, but outside of us, is supposed to be at work. There has been some discussion as to whether fetishism or animism is the more primitive, and some writers would regard fetishism as a special case of animism ”

“ It is proper to point out that he has noted one great distinction between the lower and higher animism, which consists in the absence of any distinctly ethical element in the spiritual philosophy of the less cultured races. Only at a comparatively late stage of their development do the moral feelings become associated with animistic beliefs. ”

“ We have now to enter on the final topic of the investigation of Animism, by completing the classified survey of spiritual beings in general, from the myriad souls, elves, fairies, genii, conceived as filling their multifarious offices in man’s life and the world’s, up to the deities who reign, few and mighty, over the spiritual hierarchy. ”

“ Other areas of study than that of “pure” philosophy seem to have yielded, or to be yielding, the same result. Mr. Mead quotes, for instance, some recent studies of Animism to show that Animism, which, together with Anthropomorphism, we used to dismiss as merely a primitive mode of thought, may, after all, prove to contain a truth, the truth, namely, that Nature is living and intelligent, and, on that account, not so far from human nature as we had come to imagine. ”

“ The idea of animism, the belief that everything had a personality of its own, certainly belonged to the later prehistoric period, for among the articles which fill the graves of aboriginal peoples, for use on the last journey, we find weapons to enable the deceased to drive off the evil spirits which would surround his own after death. ”