imagery, shadows and reflections, but these have led to no conclusion.[1]
If primitive man reacted to the phenomena that stimulated his reflection with the formation of conceptions of the soul, and then transferred these to objects of the outer world, his attitude will be judged to be quite natural and in no way mysterious. In view of the fact that animistic conceptions have been shown to be similar among the most varied races and in all periods, Wundt states that these “are the necessary psychological product of the myth forming consciousness, and primitive animism may be looked upon as the spiritual expression of man’s natural state in so far as this is at all accessible to our observation.”[2] Hume has already justified the animation of the inanimate in his “Natural History of Religions,” where he said: “There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted and of which they are intimately conscious.”[3]
Animism is a system of thought, it gives not only the explanation of a single phenomenon, but makes it possible to comprehend the totality of
