Snow, and the Quality of Whiteness. 119 
another, which seems more simple and satisfactory 
—to its author, at all events: which 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 
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 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that this faculty is obsolete in us, that it is effec- 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 walk on a moonlit night in the 
“ Woods of Westermain,” or any other woods, since 
all are enchanted. 
