ANIMATISM is the tendency of the primitive mind to re gard and treat the inanimate, in so far as it is held to be sacred, as if it were animated—that is, alive and endowed with feelings and a will of its own. In imputing animatism to the savage, due allowance must be made for the fact that he is largely unconscious of the theory underlying his practice. Thus when a Toda of the Nilgiri hills in India feeds his sacred cattle-bell with milk, the civilized observer might justly draw the inference that the bell was supposed somehow to enjoy the milk; and yet it would prob ably be the fact that a given Toda who carries out this act of respect is blindly following religious custom, and has never troubled his head to think whether the bell, which obviously can not drink in the ordinary manner, can nevertheless in some mir aculous way get much the same satisfaction out of the milk as could a man or a cat. The word animatism was coined by Marett in 1899 to mark off a distinguishable phase of belief concerning whatever is deemed sacred and as such becomes the object of religious or quasi-religious attention and behaviour. Marett point ed out that Sir E. B. Tylor, when in Primitive Culture (1871), chap. xi., he suggested the term animism (q.v.), in the sense of "the belief in spiritual beings," as a "minimum definition of re ligion," had already in a previous chapter on mythology (chap. viii.) used the word animism in a different sense, namely, as the "theory of the universal animation of nature." The latter mean ing is thus different and ought to be kept clear of the former. Marett therefore proposes that a separate word "animatism" should be used to express it. He argues that the notion of being alive is logically distinct from and historically and psychologi cally more rudimentary than the notion of being associated with a spiritual or soul-like being. He is, however, for limiting the application of the notion in question more narrowly than Tylor, who imputes to the savage a tendency to imagine nature as uni versally animated or alive. For can there ever have existed a sav age who was mentally incapable of regarding anything whatever, an ordinary stone for instance, as unalive? Does not even the baby soon learn to distinguish its nurse by her relatively arbitrary proceedings from the chair with its thoroughly wooden way of reacting to the baby's way of thumping it? On the other hand, if the chair creaked in a peculiar manner it might frighten the baby, and might thereupon pass over into the class of objects that act arbitrarily, such as nurse with her uneven temper, or pussy that sometimes purrs and sometimes scratches. So too, then, the savage tends to put the stone into another category if it behaves queerly—if it refuses to be chipped into shape and cuts his finger, or emerges in the midst of the rapids and upsets his canoe. Nay, it need not act queerly; it is enough if it seems about to do so by looking queer. Just so the hunted animal per ceives danger lurking in every unusual sight, or sound, or smell. The savage, however, being mentally a long way in advance of the animal, has generalized the unusual in a dim fashion, and has words of the type of mana (q.v.) to connote in the unfamiliar object a power of affecting man for better or worse—mostly, perhaps, for worse—in ways that defeat reasonable Animatism is therefore limited to the attribution of life to the unfamiliar, since it is an exaggeration to say that there is no room within the savage mind for any apprehension of the unalive. Further, for the purposes of the comparative study of re ligion in all its phases, including the most rudimentary, the un familiar may be identified with the sacred—that which is posi tively mana, or instinct with power to help or hurt in an unusual degree, and negatively is tabu (q.v.), that is, not lightly to be approached. Correspondingly, a "pre-animistic" type of religious belief and observance is distinguished in which no animism is involved in Tylor's second sense of the recognition of soul or spirit with a being of its own, distinct from bodily substance. In this pre-animistic theory a question of minor importance is whether mana and animatism go strictly together—that is to say, whether whatever has wonder-working power must necessarily seem likewise alive. It is rather a doubtful point, seeing that mana is often treated as if it were transmissible or contagious, like electricity or the influenza; whereas to think of a man's life as extending to his belongings is perhaps not so natural or easy. As a matter of fact, however, magic is practised on a man's clothes or on the clippings of his hair or nails, or on his personal name, or in fact on anything that can be identified with the man so far as to call him up to mind and conjure up a sense of his real presence, in the belief that thereby the man will be deprived of his very life. Thus life would seem on this vague view of it to be no less contagious than mana, one or the other being alike a sort of communicable energy. Now, because such energy is com municable, it does not follow that there are not appropriate centres at which it originates; just as a push started by one man in a row may make itself felt right down the line. Some objects, for instance, would appear to be intrinsically sacred in the eyes of the savage, while in the case of anything else the sacredness is but acquired by association with such things as are sacred in themselves. In particular, certain types of persons, medicine men, kings, women, strangers and so on, are considered sacred in their own right ; and in such cases their mana may very natu rally be treated as much the same as their will-power—an energy that is bound up with such personal initiative as they display. Indeed, in any case the unfamiliar is bound to strike the mind that is in awe of it as more or less self-active, since it does the threatening and he knocks under to it. In all magical conflict the result depends on which of the two has the initiative; for if I see the wolf before he sees me he cannot cast his spell over me but slinks off powerless. Thus mana implies life as manifested in initiative; so that John Murphy in Primitive Man: his Essential Quest (1927) is fully justified in representing the content of the confused notion at the back of animatism by the triad, "power life-will." Further, the body or external appearance in and through which such power-life-will is exerted forms part of the same complex; the driving force and its vehicle, the god and the god's car, not being yet held apart in thought. At the pre-animis tic stage the mind takes in the live wire, but has not yet taken in that electricity is the live thing in the wire and the rest but con sentient matter. Of course these distinctions are made by the civilized man for his own classificatory purposes. The savage is unaware of stages in his thought, nay, mostly of the very fact that he thinks at all; and he does not change gear with any notice able jerk when he shifts by slow degrees to a higher plane of analytic consciousness. If, however, the student of comparative religion hopes to make anything of what William James has called the "big buzzing booming confusion" of dawning reflection about the sacred and divine, he must boldly differentiate certain leading types, and may well find "animatism" to be a convenient way of representing the most rudimentary type of all.