Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/65

Rh ANIMÉ, a resinous exudation from the courbaril tree, which grows in the West Indies and in South America. When imported in the natural state it is infested with vast numbers of insects, and hence the name. It is of a pale brown colour, transparent, brittle, and in consequence of its agreeable odour is much used for fumigation and in perfumery. Its specific gravity varies from 1•028 to 1•054. It melts readily over the fire, and softens even with the heat of the mouth, but is insoluble in water. It is dissolved by alcohol, but not completely, unless the spirit be boiling. It is allied to copal in its nature and appearance, and is much used by varnish-makers.

ANIMISM, a term formerly employed in Biology to denote the theory of which Stahl is the chief expositor ; the theory of the soul (anima) as the vital principle, cause of the normal phenomena of life, or of the abnormal phenomena of disease. It is now current in the wider anthropological sense given to it by Dr E. B. Tylor (Primitive Culture, chapters xi.-xvii.), as including the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings. This application is not only appropriate, but is even rendered indispensable by the absence of any other suitable word; for spiritualism, though occasionally used in a general sense, has become associated with a particular modern development of animistic doctrine ; anthropomorphism, if less objectionable, is also to some degree inadequate ; while the term theology cannot be extended to include the lower forms of the doctrine of spiritual beings, and indeed many of its higher developments, except by an ill-considered departure from ordinary usage, which raises in many minds a prejudice against the most reliable results of anthropological inquiry.

An animistic philosophy, explaining the more strange or striking phenomena of nature by the hypothesis of spiritual agency, is universally prevalent among savage races; and unless the wide-spread animistic beliefs of savages are to be regarded as but degenerate or corrupted relics of those possessed by more cultured peoples, a theory which can scarcely be held to account for the essential and native appropriateness of animism as it flourishes among races of low culture, and its less appropriate and apparently derivative character as it survives in higher civilisations, there seems tenable ground for the inference, that an animistic philosophy must have been that which was earliest developed among the prehistoric societies of mankind. In accordance with this view, animism may be described as the distinctive philosophy of primitive culture. It is manifestly the outcome and development of that earliest analogical reasoning, which concludes external objects to be animated with a life essentially similar to our own; it is the expression and application of our first general theory of natural causes, a theory rude and inadequate, yet marvellously self-consistent and serviceable : and its history appears primarily to be that of a dominant and pervading philosophy, applied to explain all the phenomena of nature and life, save only those ordinary sequences which the uncivilised man regards as needing no explanation; afterwards, in the progress of culture, that of a system of thought always more or less modified and restricted by the increase of positive knowledge, and surviving only in greatly refined or greatly enfeebled forms, or only reviving at intervals of time.

Of the origin of animism perhaps no perfect account has yet been given, It can hardly be said to be obvious why, in uncultured races or individuals, there should arise that invariable tendency to represent natural forces as conscious and anthropomorphic. There is reason to believe, how ever, that the type of all the forms in which the tendency manifests itself, is to be discovered in the conception of the human soul. Evidently the notion of an animating, separable, and surviving soul commends itself as the ready explanation of many familiar phenomena, and the appropriate instrument of a philosophy which ascribes animation to nature at large ; so that thus, according to the account given by Dr Tylor, primitive animism may be considered to have arisen simply from the evidence of men s senses, interpreted by the crude and childlike science of the pre historic world. From the sight of life and death it was, he conceives, naturally inferred that every man has a life, or vital principle, the departure of which from his body causes death, this idea being confirmed by apparent temporary departures, such as swoons and sleep. From the appearance of men seen in dreams and visions, it was not less cogently argued that every man has also a phantom likeness of his body, separable from it so as to appear to others at any distance, and continuing to exist and appear after the bodily death of its proper owner. Accordingly, the definition of the soul in primitive religion would, as in the lower existing religions it actually does, combine these leading qualities in the conception of an "apparition al soul," which is a thin, unsubstantial human image, the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates, capable of quitting his body for a time or altogether, and so leaving him insensible or dead, and when thus absent from the body appearing to other persons asleep or awake. From this conception, then, animism may reasonably be supposed to have had its origin, especially as other animistic doctrines exhibit such a distinct affinity and relationship to this of the apparitional soul, as almost amounts to a proof of direct derivation from it. The hypothesis being correct, it would, for instance, follow that the lower animals ought to be considered as having souls similar to human souls, inasmuch as they have life, and their phantoms are likewise seen. Moreover, though inert objects, such as clothes or weapons, have not life, yet their phantoms appear to men in dreams, and thus they must be considered as having something of the nature of souls, separable from their grosser part, and surviving its destruction. Now, in fact, both these ideas are recognised in the religions of the lower races. They come into special prominence in the savage and barbaric rite of sacrifice for the dead, where not only are wives and slaves slain to do service to their master s soul in the world of spirits, but horses and cattle are slaughtered to be spiritually transmitted thither, and clothes, ornaments, and other articles are destroyed, that he may wear and use the "object-souls" thus sent to him. The savage doctrine of a future state, presently to be referred to, also strikingly corroborates the theory of the phantom soul as the origin and centre of animistic thought.

There remains, however, the difficulty of understanding by what process this rudimentary doctrine of the soul has grown into the great system of developed animism : a system of thought so comprehensive as to hold all nature in a web of vital action and spontaneity ; so multiform as to invent some new spirit-race for almost every fresh order of phenomena ; so coherent as to create a perfect plexus of ideas that mutually support and interpret one another ; finally, so persistent, that even its more extravagant developments can survive for ages in defiance of accurate knowledge. It is difficult to realise how exceedingly slow and gradual must have been that growth of positive science and its methods of verification, which has allowed a fanciful and little regulated philosophy to take root so firmly and cast its branches so far. Yet only by a great and connected development does it seem possible that animism could be so matured and extended. Regarding many, at least, of the varied forms of animistic belief, there is already sufficient evidence to make it probable that they have arisen by one continuous process of evolution, extending through the lower to the higher civilisation.