Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/298

290 I.—My first Query is: Does not the theory of Animism—so far as it is an attempt to account for the conception of Nature as animated—inconsistently ignore an admittedly primitive conception of Nature which, if consistently recognised, would make the theory unnecessary; and is not the consequent subsumption of Fetishism under Animism a self-contradictory confusing of two essentially different conceptions?

Both Mr. Spencer and Dr. Tylor admit, though in different ways, that the notion of the animation of nature by "souls" was not the primordial conception of Nature. According to Mr. Spencer, the earliest conception of Nature was one in which there was the most definite discrimination between "animate" and "inanimate", living and dead. This theory I may elsewhere have occasion to discuss, and here I shall only remark that it appears to be founded on the singular fallacy of confusing the very abstract notions of "animate" and "inanimate" with the very concrete notions of harmful and harmless. Dr. Tylor, however, declares that, "for his part he fails to see anything to object to in the ordinary notion that savages do directly personify the Sun, or the Sky, the Wind, or the Rivers, treating them as great beings acting by will, and able to do good or harm." But if there was, as Dr. Tylor elsewhere more briefly puts it, "a primordial personification of inanimate objects and powers", it is difficult to see the logical necessity for the elaboration of a theory of "souls" wherewith to animate things which are already ex hypothesi animated by "personification". Here Mr. Spencer is incomparably more logical. For, as he affirms that all animals, "from cirrhipeds and seaflies", have, and that man also had primordially, the marvellous capacity of perfectly discriminating between "animate" and "inanimate", and as he yet admits that, as a matter of fact, men do not now so discriminate, he is obliged to invent his theory of "ghosts", in order to attempt, at least, to account for the later non-discrimina-