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Updated: June 2, 2025
Only later did the animistic belief in the personalities of men, animals, and the forces of nature appear. When man discovered his own individuality he spontaneously ascribed the same type of individuality and purpose to animals and plants, to the wind and the thunder. This exhibits one of the most noxious tendencies of the mind namely, personification.
Chemists and physicians have given up talking of spirits, but in discussing social and economic questions we are still victimized by the primitive animistic tendencies of the mind. The dream has had a great influence in the building up of the mind. Our ideas, especially our religious beliefs, would have had quite another history had men been dreamless.
Carpenter believed, we cannot tell how many other marvels it may perform; we cannot know till we investigate further. If this be so, it is, perhaps, hardly wise or scientific to taboo all investigation. If a mere trivial drawing-room amusement, associated by some with an absurd 'animistic hypothesis, can, when explained by Dr.
The industrial value of such a lively animistic sense, or of such recourse to a preternatural agency or the guidance of an unseen hand, is of course very much the same in either case.
But it is difficult in practice to distinguish the two phases of thought and no clear account of animatism can yet be given, largely on the ground that no people has yet been discovered which has not already developed to a greater or less extent an animistic philosophy.
The modern reminiscence of the belief in the hamingia, or in the guidance of an unseen hand, which is traceable in the acceptance of this maxim is faint and perhaps uncertain; and it seems in any case to be blended with other psychological moments that are not clearly of an animistic character.
But the last form of the battle between the animistic and the physical views of life is seen in the contention whether the physical analysis of vital phenomena can be carried beyond this point or not.
One must reply that this pedigree cannot, indeed, be historically traced, but that it presents none of the logical difficulties inherent in the animistic pedigree namely, that the savage Supreme Being is the last and highest result of evolution on animistic lines out of ghosts. It does not run counter to the evidence universally offered by savages, that their Supreme Being never was mortal man.
That conception alone could neither supply the moral motive of 'a soul to be saved, nor satisfy the metaphysical instinct of advancing mankind. The blending of the theistic and the animistic beliefs was indispensable to religion. But, in the process of animistic development under advancing social conditions, degeneration was necessarily implied.
The animistic tendency in that part of Asia dominated by the Chinese world of ideas shows itself not only in a belief in messengers or embodiments of divine malevolence or benevolence, but also in the location of the spiritual influence in or upon an inanimate object or fetich.
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