Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 1.djvu/594

Rh ANIMISM 528 ANIMISM in the rivers, the lakes, the fountains, the woods, the mountains, the trees, the animals, the flowers, the grass, the birds. Spiritual existences — e. g. elves, gnomes, ghosts, manes, demons, deities — inhabit al- most everything, and consequently almost everything 'is an objci'i (if worship. The Milky Way is " the path of the souls leading to the spirit-land "; and the North- em Lights are the dances of the dead warriors and Beers in the realms above. The Australians say that the .sounds of the wind in the trees are the voices of the ghosts of the dead communing with one another or warning the li'ing of what is to come. The conception of the human soul formed from dreams and visions served as a type on which prim- itive man framed his ideas of other souls and of spiritual beings from the lowest elf up to the highest god. Thus the gods of the higher religions have been evolved out of the spirits, whether ghosts or not, of the lower religions; and the beUef in ghosts and spirits was produced by the savage's experience of dreams and trances. Here, it is claimed, we have the germ of all religions, although Tylor con- fesses that it is impossible to trace the process by which the doctrine of souls gave rise to the belief in the great gods. Originally, spirits were the appli- cation of human souls to non-human beings; they were not supernatural, but only became .so in the course of time. Now, as modern science shows the belief in ghosts or spirits to be a hallucination, the highest and purest religion — being only the elabora- tion of savage beliefs, to the savage mind reasonable enough — cannot be accepted by the modern mind for the reason that it is not supernatural nor even true. Such in brief is the outline of the theory by which Tylor attempts to explain not only the phenom- enon but the whole history and development of re- Hgion. Tylor's theory expresses two sides of animism, viz., souls and spirits. Spencer attempts to syn- thesize them into one, viz., souls or ancestor-worship. He agrees with Tylor in the animistic explanation of dreams, diseases, death, madness, idiocy, i. e. as due to spiritual influences; but differs in present- ing one solution only; viz., cult of souls or worship of the dead. "The rudimentary form of all relig- ion", he writes, "is the propitiation of dead ances- tors", or "ghost propitiation". Hence Spencer denies that the ascription of life to the whole of na- ture is a primitive thought, or that men ever ascribed to animals, plants, inanimate objects, and natural phenomena souls of their own. Spencer's theory IS known as the " Ghost-theory of Religion " and at the present time is generally discredited even by evolutionists. With Tylor the worship of the dead is an important subdivision of animism; with Spen- (•er it is the one and all of religion. Lippert consis- tently carries out the theory of Spencer and, instead of animism, uses the word Seelenkult. De la Saus- saye says that Lippert pushes his view to an extreme and supports it with rich, but not over-ti-ustworthy, material. Schultze considers fetishism and animism as equally primitive. F. B. Jevons rejects the theory that all gods of earlier races were spirits of dead men deified. The animism of Tylor is vague and indefinite. It means the doctrine of spirits in general, and is best expres.sed by "Animated Nature". Fetishism is a subordinate department of animism, viz. the doc- trine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or con- veying influence through, certain animals or ma- terial objects. The animism of Tylor differs little from the natur.ilism of Heville or the fetishism of De la Hialle. It accounts for the belief in immor- tality and metempsychosis. It thus explains the belief in the passage of souls from men to beasts, antl to sticks and stones. It includes tree-worship and plant-worsliip— c. g. the classic liamadryad, the tree-worship of the South .frican natives, the rice- feasts held by the Dyaks of Borneo to keep the rice- souls in the plants lest by their departure the crop decay. It is the solution proposed for Manes-wor- ship, for the Lares and the Penates among the tJreeks and Romans, where the dead ancestors, passing into deities, go on protecting the family as the dead cliief watches over the tribe. In animism Tylor finds an explanation for funeral rites and customs — feasts of the deail, the human sacrifices of witiows in India, of slaves in Borneo; sending messages to dead cliiefs of Dahomey by killing capties taken in war, the slaughtering of the Pawnee's hor.se and of the Arab's camel at the graves of their masters, placing food and weapons in, or on, the tomb — customs which survive in the practice of burning paper messengers and placing stone, clay, or wooden substitutes on graves in China and Japan. The general principles of animism are: (1) in the last analysis it is a biological theory, and attempts to explain all phenomena through analogy with biological phenomena. To the savage, and to prim- itive man, all moving things lived, and the fancy which created ghosts or souls to account for hu- man life soon extended this explanation to all other external objects. (2) The greater value it at- taches to unwritten sources, viz., folk-lore, customs, rites, tales, and superstitions, in comparison with literary sources. (3) That spiritual beings are modelled by man on the primary conception of his own human soul. (4) Their purpose is to explain nature on the primitive, cliildhke theory that it is thoroughly and throughout animated "nature. (5) The conception of the human soul is the source and origin of the conceptions of spirit and deity, from the lowest demon up to Plato's ideas and the highest God of Monotheism. (6) Yet it gives no unified concept of the world, for the spirits which pos.sess, pervade, and crowd nature are individual and in- dependent. (7) It is without ethical thoughts and motives. Thus Tylor holds as proved that religion and morality stand on independent grounds; that, while lower races have a code of morals, yet their religion — animism — is unmoral, and thus the popular idea that the moral go'erninent of the universe is an essential tenet of natural reUgion simply falls to the ground. The followers of Tylor have pushed these prin- ciples to an extreme and appUed them with more clearness and precision. The present tendency of the anthropological school is to begin with a pre- religious stage, from which religious ideas slowly emerged and elaborated themselves. Hence re- ligious life was preceded by a period characterized by an utter absence of religious conceptions. Thus Tiele holds that animism is not a religion, but a sort of primitive philosophy, which not only controls religion, but rules the whole life of man in the child- hood of the world. It is a belief that every living thing — i. e. moving thing — is for primitive man an- imated by a thinking, feeling, willing spirit, dif- fering from the human in degree and power only. Religion did not spring from animism, but its first manifestations are dominated by animism, that being the form of thought natural to primitive man. Pfleiderer teaches that belief in God was formed out of the prehistoric belief in spirits, that these spirits are anccstor-s]5irits and nature-spirits found everywhere in the primeval period of peoples sitle by side with one another and passing into each other in various forms of combination without the one being able to be referreti to the other, that the prehistoric belief in spirits cannot yet be properly calleil religion — it only contained the germs of re- ligion. Caspari teaches a pre-animistic period in the family circle and holds that the worsnip of el- ders and chieftains was the first religion. UriutOD