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Updated: May 19, 2025
But we are very anthropomorphic, and totally ignorant of the conditions of the problem." In like manner it might have been, that God willed to let men wander through the slums and backways of animism into the open road of theism. But our concern is not with what might have been, but with what was. Mr.
He confessed that he could not bear to accept a world which was like a leaky pot or a man running at the nose. In short, he ascribed the highest form of existence to ideals and abstractions. This was a new and sophisticated republication of savage animism.
With the rise of a belief in departmental gods comes the age of polytheism; the belief in elemental spirits may still persist, but they fall into the background and receive no cult. Animism and the Origin of Religion.
There are suggestions of his, relating to country roads and country Inns and country solitudes, like nothing else, except, perhaps, the Vignettes of Bewick. He carries the same "animism" into this also. And he notes and records sensations of the most evasive kind.
Animism, fetishism, nature-worship, sun-worship these are the constituents of the primeval mud out of which has grown the splendid lily of religion. A Krishna, a Buddha, a Lao-tze, a Jesus, are the highly civilised but lineal descendants of the whirling medicine-man of the savage. God is a composite photograph of the innumerable Gods who are the personifications of the forces of nature.
To begin with, the myth is transformed into philosophic speculation, but without total disappearance, as is seen in the mystic speculations of the Pythagoreans, in the cosmology of Empedocles, ruled by two human-like antitheses, Love and Hate. Even to Thales, an observing, positive spirit that calculates eclipses, the world is full of daemons, remains of primitive animism.
Now when the theory of object-souls is expanded into a general doctrine of spirits, the philosophic scheme of animism is completed.
Yet, whatever its form in literature or art, it is the later elaborated representation of ancient Animism which selected the tortoise as one of the manifold incarnations or media of the myriad spirits that populate the air. At will it reduces itself to the size of a silk-worm, or is swollen until it fills the space of heaven and earth.
Before examining the researches and the results of this learned body, we may glance at some earlier industry of investigators. The common savage beliefs are too well known to need recapitulation, and have been treated by Mr. Tylor in his chapter on 'Animism, and by Mr. Herbert Spencer in Principles of Psychology. The points of difference between these authors need not detain us here.
This Animism, 'in its full development, includes the belief in souls and in a future state, in controlling deities and subordinate spirits. In Mr. Tylor's opinion, as in Mr. But this topic must be reserved for our closing chapters. Mr.
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