Animism: Chapter I. The Animistic Stage of Culture--the Case Stated

This is an early twentieth-century academic text in the tradition of comparative religion and anthropology, likely a chapter introduction to a broader study of animism. It opens with a 1916 news account of a dead captive snake in Japan whose grave attracted worshippers seeking cures for toothache — using this as a contemporary exhibit of animistic belief persisting into modernity. The author then marshals biblical examples (Jacob anointing a stone, Joshua's sentient stone witness, a meteorite worshipped at Ephesus) to argue that animism is not a relic of remote prehistory but a living and widespread cultural stage. Drawing heavily on E. B. Tylor's *Primitive Culture*, the text defines animism as the attribution of soul, sentience, and volition to all objects — stones, rivers, animals, tools — rooted in what the author calls "unintegrated consciousness," a mode of thought in which the self is not distinguished in kind from the surrounding world. A distinctive claim is that this is primarily a *psychological* stage, not merely a religious one, characterized by the inability to separate substance from attribute, cause from effect, or self from other — with Hobhouse's formulation that animism and magic share the same intellectual foundation in this categorical confusion. The text's perspective is firmly evolutionist and carries the colonial-era assumption that "civilized" thought has superseded animism, making it of interest both as a substantive account of animistic belief systems and as a document of early-twentieth-century anthropological method and bias.

Animism: Chapter I. The Animistic Stage of Culture--the Case Stated

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