Note 26.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

The religious practices of savage and barbarous peoples are largely based upon ideas which anthropologists have agreed to group together under the comprehensive title of animism. Animism is, to quote Sir Edward Tylor, who was the first to investigate the subject and to use the word in this sense, “the groundwork of the philosophy of religion, from that of savages up to that of civilized man.”26.1 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. Let us note, however, that this soul is not necessarily immaterial. The refined conception of the soul, which we have received from the Greek philosophers, belongs not to the savage. To him, as to the average man of civilization, the notion of an absolutely immaterial being would seem to be unthinkable. At all events it has hardly occurred to him. The soul, to him, may be thin as a vapour, oftentimes invisible as the air; at other times it takes a visible and even tangible form. So far as it is connected with what we know as a living body, the ordinary, familiar form and substance, it is the principle of life. But it is capable of existing independently of the body, at least for a time. The body, on the other hand, is also capable of continuing to exist, and even to live, though not in full health and vigour, for a time without the soul; but a lengthened separation usually means death. This, without taking account of details varying from culture to culture and people to people, may be described as the outline of the savage doctrine of the soul, reduced as nearly as may be into the terms in which we think. Beyond this, and probably as a development of it, is the belief in spirits, beings frequently vague and shadowy, sometimes regarded as more substantial, sometimes inhabiting objects and persons known and definite, at other times unattached, but in all cases of more or less power, which may be exercised to the advantage or to the detriment of their human fellows, or perhaps subordinates. The distinction between spirits and gods is not very easy to formulate, and need not for our present purpose trouble us.