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Updated: May 2, 2025
But the feeling, whether expressed or not, was always there. Before the classic period we find in Traherne a poetry which was distinctly animistic, with Christianity grafted on it. Wordsworth's pantheism is a subtilized animism, but there are moments when his feeling is like that of the child or savage when he is convinced that the flower enjoys the air it breathes.
It is that frame of mind which does not instinctively impute an animistic propensity to things, nor resort to preternatural intervention as an explanation of perplexing phenomena, nor depend on an unseen hand to shape the course of events to human use.
So far as this is the case it must be set down as the expression of an archaic, animistic habit of mind.
We do not pretend to discover, without examination, the causes of the sounds and sights which baffle trained and not superstitious investigators. But we do say that similar occurrences, in a kraal or an Eskimo hut, in a wigwam, in a cave, or under a gunyeh, would greatly confirm the animistic hypothesis of savages.
The development of a pantheon, graded and more or less regulated under the guidance of the Babylonian schoolmen, did not drive the old animistic views out of existence. In the religious literature, and more especially in those parts of it which reflect the popular forms of thought, the unorganized mass of spirits maintain an undisputed sway.
Im Thurn's description of the Guianese be correct, everything we know of human nature, and of evolution, assures us that the Father, or Maker, or Ancient of Days came first; the ghost-gods, last. The Zulus are the great standing type of an animistic or ghost-worshipping race without a God. The evidence, collected by Dr. Callaway, is honest, but confused.
I find also no animistic ideas, or practices; no folk-lore and no magic. The Quaker Hill imagination has been disciplined.
To regard the stars in general as gods is a consequence of animistic notions; but the further steps in the process which led to connecting the planets and certain other stars with particular deities who originally had nothing to do with the stars, fall within the province of scholastic theory.
If the savage only dreamt of the dead, he might find in this an evidence of their survival, but he dreams far more often of the living, and that, with circumstances which make the illusion manifest on waking. Seeing the awe and terror which all men have of the supernatural region, we ought, on the animistic hypothesis, to find among savages a great reluctance to go to bed "to sleep!
If in the animistic stage, when everything that is is worked by spirits, it is possible and desirable for the individual to gain his individual ends by the coöperation of some spirit, it is equally possible and more desirable for the community to gain the aid of a spirit which will further the ends for the sake of which the community exists.
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