116 IDLE DAYS IN PATAGONIA 



all exceptional phenomena. The mysterious feel- 

 ings produced in us by the sight of a snow-whit- 

 ened earth are not singular, but are similar in 

 character to the feelings caused by many other 

 phenomena, and they may be experienced, al- 

 though in a very slight degree, almost any day 

 of our lives, if we live with nature. 



It must be explained that animism is not used 

 here in the sense that Tyler gives it in his Primi- 

 tive Culture: in that work it signifies a theory of 

 life, a philosophy of primitive man, which has 

 been supplanted among civilized people by a more 

 advanced philosophy. Animism here means not a 

 doctrine of souls that survive the bodies and ob- 

 jects they inhabit, but the mind's projection of 

 itself into nature, its attribution of its own sen- 

 tient life and intelligence to all things that 

 primitive universal faculty on which the animistic 

 philosophy of the savage is founded. When our 

 philosophers tell us that this faculty is obsolete 

 in us, that it is effectually killed by ratiocination, 

 or that it only survives for a period in our chil- 

 dren, I believe they are wrong, a fact which they 

 could find out for themselves if, leaving their 

 books and theories, they would take a solitary 

 walk on a moonlit night in the "Woods of Wester- 

 main," or any other woods, since all are en- 

 chanted. 



Let us remember that our poets, who speak 

 not scientifically but in the language of passion, 

 when they say that the sun rejoices in the sky and 



