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But when Mr. Lang, who has no hypothesis of his own as to the origin of belief in God, brings the animistic theory to an
He may alternate strangely between austerities and wild debauch, but the sentimentality of some Kṛishṇaite sects is alien to him. He is a magician, the lord of troops of spirits, and thus draws into his circle all the old animistic worship. Stories are invented or adapted to account for his various attributes, and he is provided with a divine family.
The sun and moon being regarded as deities, under the influence of primitive animistic ideas, the stars would also come to be looked upon as divine.
Meanwhile the comparatively few persons who can see pictures in a clear depth, may be as innocently employed while so doing, as if they were watching the clouds, or the embers. 'May be, one must say, for crystal-seers are very apt to fall back on our old friend, the animistic hypothesis, and to explain what they see, or fancy they see, by the theory that 'spirits' are at the bottom of it all.
Some people have jeered at the 'animistic' or 'anthropomorphic' tendency of primitive man in his contemplation of the forces of Nature or his imaginations of religion and the gods. With a kind of superior pity they speak of "the poor Indian whose untutored mind sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind."
The real character of these movements was ill understood in our country, but it was inevitable that with man's deep-seated animistic tendencies they should appear as a sort of wicked demon or a deadly contagion which might attack even our own land unless prevented by timely measures.
Their putative familiarity with scientific methods and the scientific point of view should presumably exempt the faculties of these schools from animistic habits of thought; but there is still a considerable proportion of them who profess an attachment to the anthropomorphic beliefs and observances of an earlier culture.
Greek philosophy could hardly restore that Eternal for whom the Prophets battled in Israel; whom some of the lowest savages know and fear; whom the animistic theory or cult everywhere obscures with its crowd of hungry, cruel, interested, food-propitiated ghost-gods.
The term Animism may, as far as I can see, be quite well applied to the social affiliation, for the latter is evidently only a case in which the individual projects his own degree of consciousness into the human group around him instead of into the animals or the trees, but it is a case of which the justice is so obvious that the modern man can intellectually seize and understand it, and consequently he does not tar it with the 'animistic' brush.
That barbarian human nature in which the predatory instinct and the animistic standpoint predominate is normally prone to both. The predatory habit of mind involves an accentuated sense of personal dignity and of the relative standing of individuals. The social structure in which the predatory habit has been the dominant factor in the shaping of institutions is a structure based on status.
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