Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/175

Rh everyone is aware how exceedingly difficult it is to do them justice. How much more difficult, therefore, must it be in the case of the earliest dim heart-stirrings and fancies of the race, to truthfully preserve the indistinctness of the original, and yet make clear the nature of that germinal source whence our own complex beliefs and aspirations must be supposed to have arisen.

Animism as a technical term applied to Religion, calls attention to the presence of a more or less definite creed or body of ideas. According to Dr. Tylor, who presented it to Anthropology, it signifies "the belief in the existence of Spiritual Beings," that is to say, of "spirits" in the wide sense that includes "souls." A looser use of the woid by some writers, whereby it is made to cover the various manifestations of what is commonly but cumbrously styled the "anthropomorphic" tendency of savage thought, will here be ignored, and a fresh expression substituted, seeing that such an extension of its meaning robs the term of its exacter and more convenient connotation^ and, further, seeing that it has failed to win general recognition from men of science.

No anthropologist, of course, has ever supposed himself able fully and finally to explain the origin of the belief in souls and spirits. Indeed, with regard to absolute origins of all kinds we had best say at once with the philosopher that "Nothing is strictly original save in the sense that everything is," Dr. Tylor and others, however, have with great plausibility put forward a view as to the specifically formative source of the idea, in what has been nicknamed "the dream-theory." This theory asserts that the prototype of soul and spirit is to be sought especially in the dream-image and trance-image—that vision of the night or day that comes to a man clothed distinctively in what Dr. Tylor describes as "vaporous materiality," or, as the