(376 TKANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 



The religious practices of savage and barbarous peoples are based, as we now 

 know, upon ideas which we have agreed to group together under the general name 

 of Animism. Animism, indeed, is, to quote Professor Tylor, ' the groundwork of 

 the philosophy of religion, from that of savages up to that of civilised man.' As 

 he uses the word it expresses the doctrine which attributes a living and often a 

 separable soul^a soul in any case distinct from the body — alike to human beings, 

 to the lower animals and plants, and even to inanimate objects. But this doctrine 

 is itself derived from a simpler and earlier conception, whereby man attributes 

 to all the objects of external nature life and personality. In other words, the 

 external world is first interpreted by the savage thinker in the terms of his own 

 consciousness; animism, or the distinction of soul and body, is a development 

 necessitated by subsequent observation and the train of reasoning which that 

 observation awakens. 



Primitive man is so far away from us, not merely in time, but in thought, that 

 we find it difficult to imagine his attempts to grapple with the interpretation 

 of external phenomena. What waves of wonder, of awe, of terror, of hope, of 

 curiosity, of desire, of bewilderment must have rolled through the sluggish dawn 

 of his intellect ! As he struggled in his little communities (little indeed by 

 comparison with ours) with the evolution of speech, how did those various and 

 perhaps ill-defined emotions come to utterance ? He was not naturally speculative. 

 Savage man even now is not, as a rule, speculative, though observers who have 

 had opportunities of comparison have noted great diflerences in this respect 

 between one people and another. Everything primitive man saw, everything he 

 heard or felt, must have struck his mind primarily in its relation to himself — or 

 rather to the community, the food-group, of which the individual formed a part, 

 to its dangers and its needs. The personal element dominated his thoughts, and 

 must have found expression in his words. As a matter of fact, it forms everj^- 

 where the basis of language. Hence it was impossible for man to interpret 

 external phenomena in any other than personal terms. This necessity may have 

 been an inheritance from a pre-human stage, since there is reason to think that 

 the lower animals project their own sensations to other animals, and even to 

 objects without life. Yet to fix the objective personalities that primitive man 

 thought he saw and felt about him must have taken time and observation. Not 

 all objects claimed his attention in the same degree or with the same insistence. 

 Some would stand out aggressively, would fill him with a sense of mystery, or of 

 power manifested in ways that seemed analogous with his own. Others would 

 long remain comparatively unregarded until something happened which awakened 

 his interest. His attitude was first of all and intensely practical, not contemplative. 

 His fellow-men, the animals he hunted, the trees whose branches he saw waving 

 in the breeze, the sun and moon overhead going their daily rounds — to all these 

 he would early attach significance : they would easily yield the personal quality. 

 But what of the pools, the hills, the rocks, and so forth ? There must have been 

 many things that long abode in the twilight of indeterminate conceptions. The 

 North American Indian lays a tribute of tobacco at the foot of any strange rock 

 whose form strikes him as he passes, or strews his gift upon the waters of the lake 

 or stream that bears his canoe. It may be that his earliest forefather who set the 

 example of such an ofifering did so without any definite conception of a personality 

 behind the phenomenon, but, smitten by fear or awe, simply sought, by the means 

 familiar to him in the case of known personal beings, to conciliate whatever power 

 mio'ht lurk beneath an unwonted form. And although a comparatively definite 

 conception of a personality might in time crystallise, to be transformed later by 

 the philosophy of animism into the idea of a spirit, yet there must always have 

 remained, after all these crystallisations, the vague and formless Unknown, con- 

 fronted in all its more prominent manifestations through the medium of an 

 undefined dread of power which might yet be revealed from it. 



In this relation of the personal and the impersonal lies, I believe, the secret of 

 primitive philosophy, if philosophy it may be called, all unreflective as it must 

 have been. There is no written record of man's earliest guesses at the meaning of 

 the universe. Whatever they were, they were limited to his immediate surround- 



