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Updated: May 19, 2025
Now, the spirits which, in the period of animism, are believed to animate things, are not, it is true, concerned with morality; but then, neither are they gods. To be a god a spirit must have a community of worshippers; and it is as the protector of that community that he is worshipped. He protects the community against any individual member who violates the custom of the community.
Animism in this sense is undoubtedly the beginning of some at least of the great religions. The Minor Nature-worship came First. M. Réville holds that the tree and the river and other such beings were the first gods, and that the deification of the great powers of nature came afterwards as an extension of the same principle. Mr.
Then, in a lower key, "It was not through animism and necromancy that the Jews came to believe in immortality." How did they reach that belief? "By thinking things out, and asking the question, Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" The answer is characteristic. Dr.
Thus every known kind of degeneration in religion is inevitably introduced as a result of the theory of Animism. We do not need an hypothesis of Original Sin as a cause of degeneration, and, if Mr. Max Müller's doctrine of the Infinite were viable, we have supplied, in Animism, under advancing social conditions, what he does not seem to provide, a cause and modus of degeneration.
Of course an ideal civilization would help and not hinder religion; but the chances against civilization being ideal are so large as to make it historically true that, advance in civilization does not always mean advance in religion and morality, and often means decay. Far from animism being the root of theism, more often it is rather the ivy that grows up about it, hides it and chokes it.
Of these two conceptions, that of the cornspirit as immanent in the corn is doubtless the older, since the view of nature as animated by indwelling spirits appears to have generally preceded the view of it as controlled by external deities; to put it shortly, animism precedes deism.
Before such objects there is usually to be seen the model of a Shinto gateway, torii.... With the development of animism, under Chinese and Korean influence, the man of Old Japan found himself truly in a world of spirits and demons.
These serpent memories, particularly the enduring image of that black serpent which when recalled restores most vividly the emotion experienced at the time, serve to remind me of a subject not yet mentioned in my narrative: this is animism, or that sense of something in nature which to the enlightened or civilized man is not there, and in the civilized man's child, if it be admitted that he has it at all, is but a faint survival of a phase of the primitive mind.
The German physiology of the school of Oken, notwithstanding his acknowledged genius, is almost as metaphysical as Hegel, and there is in France a quite recent revival of the Animism of Stahl. These metaphysical explanations, besides their inanity, did serious harm, by directing the course of positive scientific inquiry into wrong channels.
We can only theorise and make more or less plausible conjectures as to the first rudiments of human faith in God and in spiritual beings. We find no race whose mind, as to faith, is a tabula rasa. To the earliest faith Mr. Tylor gives the name of Animism, a term not wholly free from objection, though 'Spiritualism' is still less desirable, having been usurped by a form of modern superstitiousness.
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