Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/300

292 Max Müller in my criticism of Dr. Tylor's self-contradictions, I may, perhaps, venture to put the above question in such bolder terms as these: Is not the theory of Animism, notwithstanding its sanction by the Encyclopædia Britannica, one of the most illogical and self-contradictory, and hence the most inimical to clear ideas, that has ever been introduced into, and had a vogue in science?

II.—My second Query is: May not a far more verifiable and consistent account be given both of the character and of the origin of primordial conceptions of Nature than that which is offered by Dr. Tylor in his theory of Animism?

I have just pointed out the self-contradiction in Dr. Tylor's admission of a primordial personification of the inanimate objects and powers of Nature, while he at the same time sets forth a theory of the animation of Nature by the association of "souls" with all its objects; and the self-contradiction also in Dr. Tylor's subsumption of Fetishism under Animism, thus "reducing it to a mere secondary development of the doctrine of spirits", while he at the same time expressly accepts the opposed definition of Fetishism by Comte. And I have now to show that, even disregarding these self-contradictions, Dr. Tylor's definition of the primordial conception of Nature as a