ANIMISM is derived from anima, "breath," which in Latin came to have the secondary sense of "soul," very much as did the equivalent word spiritus, whence our "spirit." Hence animism might stand for any doctrine having to do with soul or spirit and, later, with souls or spirits. The word was coined early in the 18th century by Georg Ernst Stahl to describe his philosophy of a world-soul. More recently, William McDougall in Body and Mind: a history and a defence of Animism (up I) has used it to designate the "interaction-theory" of mind as an independent factor co-operating with the brain, as opposed to the various versions of what has been nicknamed "a psychology without a soul." Animism, however, will always be chiefly known as the term in which Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in Primitive Culture (1st ed. 1871) summed up his account of the origin of religion. Among anthropologists Tylor's animistic theory of religion stood unchallenged for nearly 3o years.
Although to-day the Tylorian explanation of religious origins has to be taken as subject to various important qualifications, it remains of great value; while the help it afforded at the time of its first appearance to anthropological research alike in the study and in the field can hardly be exaggerated. A whole generation of students of primitive culture sat at Tylor's feet, and more especially those whose interest lay chiefly in the history of religion.
In what follows, then, Tylor's animistic hypothesis need be considered solely in so far as it claims to supply "a minimum definition of religion." On this view, religion begins with a soul or spirit and ends with a god; a god being historically an evolved spirit, or conversely, a spirit being a god in the making. For the "belief in spiritual beings" comprises, firstly, "souls of individual creatures, capable of con tinued existence after the death or destruction of the body"; and, secondly, "other spirits, upward to the rank of powerful deities." Given the idea of soul, the rest follows by a sort of logical ex tension; seeing that "the ideas of souls, demons, deities and any other classes of spiritual beings, are conceptions of similar nature throughout, the conceptions of souls being the original ones in the series." Thus, in order to make clear the origin and whole sub sequent development, all that is still required is to explain the origin of the belief in a soul. Tylor proceeds to do it thus : "It seems as though thinking men, as yet at a low level of culture, were deeply impressed by two groups of biological problems. In the first place, what is it that makes the difference between a living body and a dead one ; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death? In the second place, what are those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions?" He goes on to suggest that the answer to the first riddle seemed to these primitive thinkers to be that every one has a life-principle that causes his body to feel, think and act but is capable of leaving it ; and the answer to the second riddle that every one has a phantom, which can also leave the body since it appears to others at a distance. Putting the two notions together, the life-principle and the phantom, they created the idea of the anima or "ghost-soul"—a separable life-principle with an unsubstantial, wraith-like form of its own. Now this is much more than a crude statement to the effect that the origin of religion is a belief in ghosts.
Herbert Spencer had not much reason on his side when he asserted that he had long before anticipated the Tylorian theory when he put forward the view that "the aboriginal god is the dead chief" (Mind, ii.
et seq. citing Westminster Review,
360 et seq.). For Tylor's point is not merely that visionary shapes are seen but likewise that the consciousness of being alive, of moving the body, of leaving it temporarily and so on, is asso ciated with these shapes.
If we describe the Tylorian explanation as "the dream-theory of religion," as is sometimes done, though very inadequately, we must not, at any rate, forget that the argument embraces both these aspects of dream; and that the aspect in which a man is aware of himself as going away to a distance during sleep should at least be as strongly emphasized as the other one in which he seems to be visited by others from a distance. Moreover, Tylor would be the first to allow that in advanced religion when God is said to be a spirit the personality alone is insisted on ; whereas the outward appearance, whether man-like, wraith-like or what not, is treated as little more than a matter of symbolic imagery.
So, too, philosophers, from Plato in the Phaedo onwards, have deduced the soul's self-existence and immortality from certain data of consciousness, the faculty of reason, the feeling of self activity, the moral sense and so on; whereas they have ever tended to regard the appeal to so-called objective manifestations of the spiritualistic order as smacking of superstition. To return to the savage, the objection to Tylor's theory is not that it is de fective as a piece of reasoning but that, on the contrary, it is much too rational a view for the human mind to have adopted at the very outset of its experience of religion. The modern psychologist utterly disbelieves in Tylor's "thinking men," who begin by conceiving an idea and thereupon proceed to mould their practice in accordance with it, and terms this the fallacy of intel lectualism—the error of subordinating action to thought instead of thought to action. Man always thinks while acting, and in some sense after acting, since the function of thought is to be rudder, not propeller—to direct, while impulse drives.
The modern method, therefore, of con ceiving the development of man's religious activity would be to presuppose that he was well on his way towards religion before he thought about it at all. Thus, supposing Tylor to be right in taking the ghost-soul to be the earliest notion in the animistic series, the modern way would be to try to find some already cur rent activity—say, funeral custom—in connection with which the idea in question might have grown up, as being in the first instance effect rather than cause. If, for instance, the custom was, as the Australian natives sometimes did, to abandon for the time being their cave-shelter, leaving the corpse there, or possibly the sick or aged man about to die, it might well happen that food and weapons would be left at the side of the body. Whereupon, by a sort of justification after the event the definite idea might grow up of a life after death in which food and weapons were needed; though at first the impulse to leave such things with the body might be almost unreasoning, amounting perhaps to no more than a dread of going near it or removing anything in contact with it. Whatever be the value of such an illustration, there can be little doubt in regard to psychological method that the Tylorian theory of the origin of religion in the idea of soul tends to put the cart before the horse. When, in 18gg, the pre-animistic theory was put forward in opposition to Tylor's account of the earliest type of religion (see ANIMATISM and MANA), this was chiefly the point at issue ; while it was at the same time suggested that the notion first generated by reaction to the object of religious awe was something much vaguer than that of soul as distinct from body, namely, that of mana, or, so to speak, the bare notion of awful ness in action. On the other hand, in the previous year Andrew Lang in The Making of Religion (1st ed. 19o8) had attacked Tylor's animistic theory of the origin of religion from another side. He brought forward numerous examples of what he called "high gods of low races" who seemed to have nothing of the anima about them, but to be more like "magnified non-natural men." There is certainly nothing wraith-like about such beings, who rather resemble glorified human beings such as were the Greek gods. Lang's suggestion as to the origin of such anthro pomorphic theism, as it might be termed, was that the notion of a maker or creator of the world might be chiefly responsible for it. This explanation, however, which he put forward quite tentatively in the introduction to the second edition, is also somewhat open to the charge of intellectualism; and it is surely more probable that the respect felt for the great chief or medicine-man—the man with mana—might continue to attach to his memory and so gen erate gods of the anthropomorphic or "man-like" pattern.
Primitive religion, on fuller investigation than was possible in Tylor's time, turns out to comprise many types of divine being that the savage does not bring under one idea at all unless it is simply that of being divine, that is to say, worshipful; his consciousness of their being worshipful growing out of the very fact that he worships them by impulse precipitated in cus tom. Thus the Tylorian animism hardly provides a basis for primitive religion, but at most will serve as a key to primitive theology. Undoubtedly, when religion has reached the stage of trying to put its ideas into order, a certain uniformity of doctrine is obtained by assuming a hierarchy of spiritual beings, gods and godlings, demons and fairies, goblins and ghosts, all of which are supposed to have enough in common in respect to their nature to be dealt with by man by methods no less fundamentally alike. Like the soul or mind of which a man is aware in himself, they belong to the unseen ; whereas the seen, like a man's body, is but the outward manifestation of a purpose that is essentially spiritual; that is, comes forth from the unseen. Such a theory paves the way for the moralization of religion, because by interpreting that which excites awe and reverence as, whatever the physical mani festation may be, an expression of will at bottom, it makes it easier to reach the position of advanced religion which tends to sum up all the good will in the universe with which man can commune and co-operate in the notion of a single and personal God.
B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871) ; J. G. Frazer, Bibliography.-E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871) ; J. G. Frazer, The Belief in Immortality (in course of publication) ; E. Clodd, Animism; A. Borchest, Der Animismus; A. Lang, The Making of Religion (1898) ; R. R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion (1914) • Animism is especially prominent in the religions of certain regions, such as Indonesia and South America. For Indonesia see G. A. Wilken, Het Animisme bij de Volker van der Indischen Archipel; A. C. Kruyt, Het Animisme in der Indischen Archipel; "L'Animisme chez les Peuples de 1'Archipel Indien," in Melusine (1886) . For South America see E. im Thurn, Among the Indians of Guiana; R. Karsten, The Civilization of the South American Indians (1926). (R. R. M.)
