Snow, and the Quality of Whiteness. 1 1 9 



anothei', whicli seems more simple and satisfactory 

 — to its author, at all events : wliich is, that that 

 mysterious something that moves us at the sight of 

 snow springs from the animism that exists in us, 

 and our animistic way of regarding all exceptional 

 phenomena. The mysterious feelings produced in 

 us by the sight of a snow-whitened earth are not 

 singular, but are similar in character to the feelings 

 caused by many other phenomena, and they may be 

 experienced, although 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 Primitive 

 Gtdfure : in that work it signifies a theory of life, 

 a philosophy of primitive man, which has been 

 supplanted among civilized people by a more ad- 

 vanced philosophy. Animism here means not a 

 doctrine of souls that survive the bodies and objects 

 they inhabit, but the mind's projection of itself into 

 nature, its attribution of its own sentient 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 that this faculty is obsolete in us, that it is effec- 

 tually killed by ratiocination, or that it only survives 

 for a period in our children, I believe they are 

 wrong, a fact which they could find out for them- 

 selves if, leaving their books and theories, they 

 would take a solitary vs^alk on a moonlit night in the 

 " Woods of Westermain," or any other woods, since 

 all are enchanted. 



