and animism. The name animism, formerly applied to a definite philosophic system, seems to have acquired its present meaning through E. B. Tylor.[1]
What led to the formulation of these names is the insight into the very remarkable conceptions of nature and the world of those primitive races known to us from history and from our own times. These races populate the world with a multitude of spiritual beings which are benevolent or malevolent to them, and attribute the causation of natural processes to these spirits and demons; they also consider that not only animals and plants, but inanimate things as well are animated by them. A third and perhaps the most important part of this primitive “nature philosophy” seems far less striking to us because we ourselves are not yet far enough removed from it, though we have greatly limited the existence of spirits and to-day explain the processes of nature by the assumption of impersonal physical forces. For primitive people believe in a similar “animation” of human individuals as well. Human beings have souls which can leave their habitation and enter into other beings; these souls are the bearers of spiritual activities and are, to a certain extent, independent of the “bodies.” Originally souls
- ↑ E. B. Tylor, “Primitive Culture,” Vol. I, p. 425, fourth ed., 1903. W. Wundt, “Myth and Religion,” Vol. II, p. 173, 1906.
