Page:Life and death (1911).djvu/21

 Both animism and vitalism separate from matter a directing principle which guides it. At bottom they are mythological theories somewhat similar to the paganism of old. The fable of Prometheus or the story of Pygmalion contains all that is essential. An immaterial principle, divine, stolen by the Titan from Jupiter, or obtained from Venus by the Cypriot sculptor, descends from Olympus and animates the form, till then inert, which has been carved in the marble or modelled in the clay. In a word, there is a human statue. It receives a breath of heavenly fire, a vital force, a divine spark, a soul, and behold! it is alive. But this breath can also leave it. An accident happens, a clot in a vein, a grain of lead in the brain—the life escapes, and all that is left is a corpse. A single instant has proved sufficient to destroy its fascination. This is how all men picture to their minds the scene of death. The breath escapes; something flies away, or flows away with the blood. The happy genius of the Greeks conceived a graceful image of this, for they represented the life or the soul in the form of a butterfly (Psyche) leaving the body, an ethereal butterfly, as it were, opening its sapphire wings.

But what is this subtle and transient guest of the human statue, this passing stranger which makes of the living body an inhabited house? According to the animists it is the soul itself, in the sense in which the word is understood by philosophers; the immortal and reasoning soul. To the vitalists it is an inferior, subordinate soul; a soul, as it were, of secondary majesty, the vital force, or in a word, life.

Primitive Animism.—Animism is the oldest and most primitive of the conceptions presented to the