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Updated: May 26, 2025
The word Animism, it should here be noticed, is used in the study of religions in a wider sense than that of Mr. Tylor. Many of the great religions are known to have arisen out of a primitive worship of spirits and to have advanced from that stage to a worship of gods.
E. B. Tylor definitely stated the view that the origin of myths is to be found in all the ideas of early man.
Not only animals, but vegetables and inorganic objects, may have been looked on by him as persons, like what he felt himself to be. But this feeling, rather than theory, may conceivably have existed among early men, before they developed the hypothesis of 'spirits, 'ghosts, or souls. It is the origin of that hypothesis, 'Animism, which Mr. Tylor investigates.
For this and the three following chapters J. B. Tylor, Anthropology, Third Edition, 1891. J. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, Fourth Edition, 1903. Frazer, The Golden Bough, Third Edition, 1900. A new edition is now appearing in parts. A. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, new edition, 1899. Th. Achelis, in De la Saussaye. Waitz und Gerland, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 1859-72.
But there are not many who have the Umabakula." Dr. Callaway's informant only knew two Umabakulists, John was quite satisfied, paid his shilling, and went home. The sticks are about a foot long. It is not reported that they are moved by spirits, nor do they seem to be regarded as fetishes. Mr. Tylor also cites a form of the familiar pendulum experiment.
But I hadn't quite got over hating a man because he had style. Well, I suppose it was a kind of a survival, as old Tylor calls it. But I tell you, I sniffed round you a good while before I made up my mind to swallow you. And that turnout of yours, it kind of staggered me, after I got over the clothes.
Tylor may seem to be taking it for granted that the earliest, remote, unknown thinkers on life and the soul were existing on the same psychical plane as we ourselves, or, at least, as modern savages. Between modern savages and ourselves, in this regard, he takes certain differences, but takes none between modern savages and the remote founders of religion. Thus Mr.
Tylor, while defending the same fundamental theory, awakens no such rebellious feelings, is due to his clear perception and realization of the fact that it is impossible to generalize in a single formula such many-sided correspondences as those which primitive poetry end philosophy have discerned between the life of man and the life of outward nature.
Here one may repeat that while the 'quaint or majestic foreshadowings' of a Supreme Being, among very low savages, are only sketched lightly by Mr. Tylor; in Mr. Herbert Spencer's system they seem to be almost omitted. In his 'Principles of Sociology' and 'Ecclesiastical Institutions' one looks in vain for an adequate notice; in vain for almost any notice, of this part of his topic.
Primitive and ignorant peoples perceive no precise distinction between man and brutes, so that, as Tylor observes, they readily accept the belief of the transmigration of the human soul into an animal, and then into inanimate objects, and this belief culminates in the incarnation of the true fetish. Among some of the North American tribes the spirits of the dead are supposed to pass into bears.
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