ANIMISM, a term forMerly applied in biology to denote the theory that the soul, anima, is the vital principle, the cause of the normal phenomena of life and of the abnor mal phenomena of disease. It is now current the wider anthropol orrical sense, as including the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings." The absence of any other suitable word is thought to render this application indispensable, and may be conceded to render it allowable; for "spiritualism," though occasionally used in a gen eral sense, has become associated with a particular modern development of animistic doctrine; "anthropomorphism," though less objectionable, is inadequate; while "the ology" cannot be extended to include the lower forms of the doctrine of spiritual beings, and indeed many of its higher developments, except by a departure from ordinary usage. An animistic philosophy, explaining the more strange or striking of the phenomena of nature by the hypothesis of direct spiritual agency, is universally prevalent among savage races; and there seems tenable ground for the inference that it must have been the philosophy earliest developed among prehistoric societies of mankind. It is mani festly the development of that earliest analogical reasoning which imagines external objects to be conscious and animated with life essentially like our own; it is the expres sion and application of the first general theory of natural causes, rude and inadequate, yet marvelously self-consistent and serviceable; and its history appears to bo primarily that of a dominant and pervading philosophy, applied to explain all the phenomena of nature and life, save only those ordinary sequences which the uncivilized man regards as needing no explanation; afterwards, in the progress of culture, its history is that of a system of thought modified and restricted by the increase of positive knowledge, and surviving in either greatly refined or greatly enfeebled forms. A. is one of those terms
which should be used not without cautious limitation of its range. In our ignorance of the nature of the soul in brutes or in men, the philosophy of the soul may easily extend itself unduly, involving on one side matter, and on the other side spirit in statements whose indeterminateness will render them unsatisfactory. A., as denoting the doctrine of the soul, has no claim to decide scientific principles pertaining to either the purely. spiritual or the purely material realm.