October 9, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



501 



seems to me that at the earlier stage there 

 can hardly have been more than recogni- 

 tion (admittedly very strong recognition) 

 of spiritual beings, and non-recognition of 

 any beginning or ending of these spirits. 



To return from this digression, Sir E. B. 

 Tylor long since gave currency to the very 

 useful word "animism" as meaning "the 

 belief in spiritual beings," and this has 

 been taken to mean that animism was the 

 initial stage, or at any rate the earliest dis- 

 coverable stage, of all religion. The primi- 

 tive Fijian was certainly a thorough-going 

 animist, if his extraordinarily strong but 

 vague recognition of spiritual beings 

 suffices to make him that; but I do not 

 think that the ideas of that kind of the 

 primitive "savage" — or, say, of the most 

 primitive Fijian — ^before his ideas had 

 been worked up into somewhat higher 

 thought, during the long period while he 

 was secluded in his remote islands and be- 

 fore the advent of the Polynesians, had 

 developed far enough to constitute any- 

 thing which could be called "religion," 

 though doubtless they were the sort of stuff 

 which, had these folk been left to them- 

 selves, might, probably did, form the basis 

 of the "religion" towards which they were 

 tending. 



Practically all human beings — ^savage and 

 civilized alike — and, though in lower de- 

 gree, even animal-folk, have in some degree 

 recognized the existence of some sort of 

 spiritual beings. The point then seems to 

 be to discover what was the nature of the 

 spiritual beings which the primitive Fijian 

 recognized but without understanding. 



Anthropologists have recently defined, 

 or at least described, several kinds of spir- 

 itual beings as recognized (even here I will 

 not use the word "believed") by more or 

 less primitive folk. There is, first, the soul, 

 or the separable personality of the living 

 man or other being ; secondly, the ghost, or 



the same thing after death; thirdly, the 

 spirit, which is said to be a soul-like being 

 which has never been associated with a 

 human or animal body ; and, fourthly, there 

 is, it appears, to be taken into considera- 

 tion yet another kind of spiritual being (or 

 something of that nature) which is the life 

 of personality, not amounting to a separa- 

 ble or apparitional soul, which, it has been 

 supposed, some primitive folk have attrib- 

 uted to what we call "inanimate things." 



It seems, though I say this with all due 

 deference, that this identification and nam- 

 ing of various kinds of spiritual beings, 

 though it may hold good of animism at a 

 higher stage, does not fit the case of the 

 more primitive animist (say, that of the 

 Melanesian in the very backward state in 

 which, as far as we know, he first reached 

 Fiji), for presumably he had not as yet 

 recognized nor differentiated between the 

 various kinds just enumerated. He recog- 

 nized something which may be called the 

 "soul," which was the separable personal- 

 ity of the living man or other being. But 

 he did not recognize — perhaps it would be 

 better to say that he had not yet attained 

 to recognition of — the ghost, or the same 

 thing after death; for he had not even 

 recognized any real break, involving 

 change, at death. Nor, as I think, did he 

 recognize a spirit, i. e., a soul-like being 

 which had never been associated with a 

 human or animal body; for he had no idea 

 of any spiritual being which did not, or 

 could not, on occasion associate itself with 

 a human, animal or other material body, 

 nor seemingly had he reached the stage, 

 labelled animatism, in which he would have 

 attributed life and personality to things 

 (which I take to mean things which are 

 to us inanimate). 



All that the most primitive man would 

 recognize would be that he himself — the 

 essential part of him— was a being (for 



