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Updated: May 19, 2025
The fact seems to be that animism is a savage philosophy which is competent to explain everything when called upon, but that the savage does not spend every moment of his waking life in invoking it: until there is some need to fall back upon it, he goes on treating inanimate things as things which he can utilise for his own purposes without reference to spirits.
Even as it is not the specialist in biology that still maintains the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection, but the non-professional and the amateur, even so the specialist acquainted with the original sources, and the explorer, possessing first hand knowledge, asserts a decline, through history, from purer to less spiritual faiths, while the bias of the evolutionist, who has no first hand knowledge of the sources constrains him to begin his scheme of religion with animism and fetish-worship.
Spencer, and these conclusions should be stated, before they are applied to the Myth of Apollo. I am not inclined, like them, to accept "Animism," or "The Ghost Theory," as the master-key to the origin of religion, though Animism is a great tributary stream.
The worship of the heavenly powers, accordingly, is with this writer the original religion. While admitting that the worship of domestic spirits grew up in the way described by the English anthropologists, he denies that Animism is ever a religion by itself without being combined with higher beliefs.
It is well known that small children often angrily strike an object against which they have stumbled. This has been interpreted as 'animism', by which it is meant that the child, by analogy with his experience of himself as a soul-filled body, imagines the things in his surroundings to be similarly ensouled.
Primitive animism continues to enchain the minds of the people, despite the differentiation established between the higher and the secondary powers, and despite the high point of development reached by the schoolmen in their attempts to systematize and, in a measure, to purify the ancient beliefs.
Yet as I have said before Animism is a perfectly sensible, logical and NECESSARY attitude of the human mind. It is a necessary attribute of man's psychical nature, by which he projects into the great World around him the image of his own mind. If you like you may call the whole process by the name of Animism. It is perfectly sensible throughout.
Yet it is older than Confucius or the book-religions, and its conception shows one of the nobler sides of Animism. The rare advent of this bird upon the earth is, like that of the kirin or unicorn, a presage of the advent of virtuous rulers and good government. It has the head of a pheasant, the beak of a swallow, the neck of a tortoise, and the features of the dragon and fish.
Next, studying what we may call the restoration of Jehovah, under the great Prophets of Israel, we noted that they, and Israel generally, were strangely indifferent to that priceless aspect of Animism, the care for the future happiness, as conditioned by the conduct of the individual soul.
As a Roman he simply gave expression to a mode of viewing nature that still seemed natural to most Greeks and Romans. The Roman farmer had not entirely outgrown his primitive animism. When he said his prayers to the spirits of the groves, the fields, and the streams, he probably did not visualize these beings in human form; manifestations of life betokened spirits that produced life and growth.
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