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Updated: May 19, 2025
Thus if we are to discuss it at all, we must first of all pick out and arrange all the foreign and mutually contradictory constituents it has incorporated, then deal with Pantheism and Animism, and with the problem of the possibility of “the true, the good, the beautiful” on the naturalistic-empiric basis, and finally there would remain a readily-grasped residue of naturalism of the second form, to come to some understanding with which is both necessary and instructive.
A more advanced stage in the history of fetichism is that which is reached by reflection on the fact that a fetich not unfrequently ceases to prosper the undertakings of its possessor in the way he expected it to do. On the principles of animism, everything that is whether animate, or inanimate according to our notions is made up of spirit, or soul, and body.
The myriads of organisms that have lived incomplete lives, and ended them in deaths of suffering are not cancelled by the probability that at some time, still in the future, a comparatively small number will lead lives of happiness. The record is there, "there is blood upon the hand," and not all the apologies of a self-convicted animism can ever wipe it clean.
The primitive Sumerian had believed in a sort of animism. Each object had its zi or "spirit," like men and beasts; the zi gave it its personality, and endowed it, as it were, with vital force. The zi corresponded with the ka or "double" of the Egyptians, which accompanied like a shadow all things in heaven and earth.
So-called "secular" and godless alternatives may be offered; but their incongruity with the whole evolution of humanity from prehistoric animism to the higher Pantheism will make their doom short and sure. In the earlier part of this essay I made the remark that Pantheism as a religion is almost entirely modern.
Although it is very doubtful that there are such now, it is probable that there were in the beginning, when man had scarcely left the brute level at least if we agree with Vignoli that we already find in the higher animals embryonic forms of animism. In any event, mythic creation appears early. We can infer this from the signs of puerility of certain legends.
Of course, as a matter of fact, every tribe in which the belief in magic is found does also believe in the existence of spirits; animism is a stage of belief lower than which or back of which science does not profess to go. But it is only in an advanced stage of its evolution that the belief in magic becomes involved with the belief in spirits.
Thus the theory of animism illumines the religious condition of that borderland of history in which Romulus and Numa Pompilius have their dwelling-place.
Yet another class of tutelar divinities remains to be noticed, those who dwell within or about the houses of men. Some are mentioned in the old mythology, and are probably developments of Japanese ancestor-worship; some are of alien origin; some do not appear to have any temples; and some represent little more than what is called Animism.
Now the fact that crude experience is innocent of modern philosophy has this important consequence: that for crude experience all data whatever lie originally side by side in the same field; extension is passionate, desire moves bodies, thought broods in space and is constituted by a visible metamorphosis of its subject matter. Animism or mythology is therefore no artifice.
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