NATURE 



[May 4, W 



and abnormal sources of nn th, but he conies to the ultimate 

 conclusion that they all depend on man's peculiar and 

 spontaneous tendency to animate all things, whence his 



general principle has taken the name of animism 



But, while assenting to this general principle, which re- 

 mains as the sole ultimate source of all mythical repre- 

 sentation, I repeat the usual inquiry ; what causes man 

 to animate all the objects which surrounds him, and what 

 is the cause of this established and universal fact ? " 



And elsewhere the author states this problem thus :— 

 "To attain our object, it is necessary that the direct 

 personification of natural phenomena, as well as the in- 

 direct personification of metaphor ; the infusion of life 

 into man's own shadow, into reflex images and dreams : 

 the belief in the reality of normal illusions, as well as of 

 the abnormal hallucinations of delirium, of madness, and 

 of all forms of nervous affections ; all these things must 

 be resolved into a single generating act which explains 

 and includes them." 



Such being the problem with which the work- is mainly 

 concerned, its solution is attempted by the following- 

 theory :— Assuming the fundamental identity of human 

 and brute psychology, it is argued a priori that, seeing 

 the tendency to personify inanimate objects is so universal 

 among primitive men, we might expect to find a similar 

 tendency in animals, and this, according to the author, 

 we do find : — 



"Animals are accustomed to show such indifference 

 towards numerous objects, that it might be supposed that 

 they have an accurate conception of what is inanimate : 

 but this arises from habit, from long experience, and 

 partly also from the hereditary disposition of the organism 

 towards this habit. But if the object should act in any 

 unusual way, then the animating process which, as we 

 have just said, was rendered static by its habitual exer- 

 cise, again becomes dynamic, and the special and perma- 

 nent character of the act is at once revealed." 



And he proceeds to describe many experiments of his 

 own, in frightening or surprising animals by making 

 inanimate objects perform unusual movements. From 

 these considerations and experiments he concludes that 

 every object of perception is " implicity assumed " by an 

 animal to be "a living, conscious, and acting subject ;" 

 that the animal transfuses into all things, " in proportion 

 to the effects which result from them, his own nature, and 

 modifies them in accordance with intrinsic form of his 

 consciousness, his emotions, and his instincts." 



This being taken as true of animals, the theory pro- 

 ceeds to the consideration that if we superimpose on the 

 animal faculties of sensation and perception, the dis- 

 tinctively human faculties of reflection 'and symbolic 

 thought, we should obtain a full explanation of the 

 psychology of myth-formation. 



We have said that this theory is to some extent novel, 

 il will now be seen that the extent to which it is so 

 consists in its relegating to the domain of animal psy- 

 chology that tendency to animism which has already been 

 recognised as the feature in human psychology which is 

 largely concerned in the formation of myth. But even 

 thus far the theory is not wholly novel, for Comte sup- 

 posed that animals possessed some crude ideas of 

 fetishism, and Spencer, in his " Principles of Sociology," 

 says : — 



"Holding, as I have given reasons for doing, that 

 fetishism is not original but derived, I cannot, of course 



coincide in this view ; nevertheless I think the behaviouj 

 ef intelligent animals elucidates the genesis of it ; " 



And he proceeds to detail cases w hich he has himself 

 observed of "the idea of voluntary action being made 

 nascent" in animals upon their seeing or feeling inanimate 

 objects moving in unaccustomed ways. This, we thin! 

 is the whole extent to which the observed facts of aniiru 

 intelligence entitle us to go. Uniformity of experience 

 generates in animals, as in young children, organised; 

 knowledge of animate and inanimate objects, so that thejj 

 are always more or less prepared with some antecedent 

 expectation of the manner in which this or that object 

 will behave. When, therefore, an inanimate object begins 

 to move in some unaccustomed manner, the animal be- 

 comes alarmed, and no donbt "the idea of voluntary 

 action becomes nascent." ' But to argue from this fact 

 that " every object, every phenomenon is for him a de- 

 liberating power, a living subject, in which consciousness 

 and will act as they do in himself," and consequently 

 that to animals the whole world " appears to be a vast 

 and confused dramatic company, in which the subjects, 

 with or without organic form, are always active, working 

 in and through themselves, with benign or malignant, 

 pleasing or hurtful influence "—to argue thus is surely to 

 go far beyond an j thing that the facts either warrant or 

 suggest. The very consideration that an animal shows 

 alarm and horror when an inanimate object begins to 

 behave like an animate one, points to the conclusion that 

 he has made a pretty definite mental classification of 

 objects as animate or inanimate. Therefore, without 

 going further into the matter, it seems to us that the 

 attempt made by this writer to argue for an universal 

 animism as a feature of brute psychology, is a failure. 



Of more interest and sounder theory is the part of his 

 work which treats of the connection between Myth and 

 Science. He says : — 



Man, by means of his reduplicative faculty, retains a 

 mental image of the personified subject, which is only 

 transitory in the case of animals, and it thus becomes an 

 inward fetish, by the same law, and consisting of the 

 same elements, as that which is only extrinsic. These 

 phantasms are, moreover, personified by the classifying 

 process of types, they are transformed into human images, 

 and arranged in hierarchy, and to this the various reli- 

 gions and mythologies of the world owe their origin. 

 Since such a process is also the condition and form of 

 knowledge, the source of myth and science is fundament- 

 ally the same, for they are generated by the same psychical 

 fact "—i.e. that of ideally classifying objects of percep- 

 tion— "the historical source of the two great streams of 

 the intellect, the mythical and the scientific, is found in 

 the primitive act of enlifying the phenomena presented to 

 the senses"— in the one case with the conception of per- 

 sonality, and in the other with that of natural order. 



This idea of myth and science having a common root 

 in the rational faculty of man is not, of course, a profound 

 one, seeing it is obvious that myth, like science, arises 

 from the need or desire of reason to explain the facts of 

 nature which are everywhere obtruded upon the observa- 

 tion of "the thinking animal"; but it is perhaps well that 

 this truth should be clearly stated, as it is in the work 

 before us. We think, however, that here, as indeed 

 throughout, the work is needlessly protracted. 



George J. Romanes 



1 See Nature, vol. xvii. p. 168 ct sea., where this subject is treated at 

 more length. 



