Animism, a term originally used to denote the theory of Stahl (q.v.), which regarded the vital principle and the soul as identical, but now used in the sense given to it by Dr Tylor as the general doctrine of spiritual beings. Dr Tylor takes the belief in spiritual existence as a minimum definition of religion. It appears among all low tribes with which we have any intimate acquaintance; and all travellers who have hitherto asserted the existence of races without it have been afterwards refuted by the facts. It may be considered to have arisen simply from the evidence of the senses, interpreted by the crude and childlike science of the savage. Two problems seem to have exercised the primitive mind. First, What is it which makes the difference between a living body and a dead one? what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, and death? In the second place, What are those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions? The savage makes these two groups of phenomena each help to account for the other, by combining both in the conception of an apparitional or ghost soul, which is conceived of as an insubstantial human image, resembling a vapour or a shadow, the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates, capable of leaving the body and appearing to men waking or asleep as a phantasm separate from the body of which it bears the likeness, and able to enter into, possess, and act in the bodies of other men, of animals, and even of things inanimate. When the sleeper awakens from a dream, he believes that his soul has really been away, or that the souls of others have come to him. His body has been still, but his living self or soul, his phantom or image, has been active. And have not waking men, in broad daylight, sometimes seen these human phantoms in what are called visions or hallucinations; and after a man has died and been buried, has not his phantom-figure continued to appear to the survivors in dreams and visions? And what is his reflection seen in still water, or his shadow falling behind him, or the breath seen for a moment issuing from his lips like a faint cloud, but the man's ghost-soul becoming visible for a moment and vanishing again? In the thought of the savage, as of the child, personality is ascribed not to men and beasts only, but also to things. His ghosts do not come to him naked, but dressed in the well-known clothing worn in life. This is the explanation of one of the most wide-spread rites of animistic religion—the offering of funeral sacrifices for the service of the dead. The phantasmal images of the objects offered pass into the possession of forms shadowy like themselves—the souls of the dead. These spiritual beings fill all nature, animate and inanimate, and their life is a continuation and not a new life in savage religion. They transmigrate into human beings, animals, plants, and lifeless things, and they can avenge their past and present wrongs by bringing disease upon the offender. The man keeps after death the temper he had in life, and is powerful for good or evil according to his inclinations while alive. From this, and not from mere family affection, arises naturally the ancestor-worship which has been from remote antiquity, and is still, the main faith of the larger half of mankind. Above the commonality of such spirits the primitive mind recognises higher spirits, or gods. Sometimes, by an extension of the natural order of life, the souls of great chiefs and warriors continue the same superior rank into the unseen world, and rise to divine honours. And the idea of the divine ancestor may even be carried far enough to reach supreme deity, as when the Zulus, working back from ancestor to ancestor, reach Unkulunkulu, the Old-old-one, as the creator of the world, thus attaining to monotheism by a natural evolution. In the most rudimentary stages of religion, ethical conceptions are but feebly developed, and there is little trace of moral retribution after death. The gods require their worshipper to perform his duty towards them, but do not necessarily concern themselves with his doing his duty to his neighbour. Yet the practical effect of religion on men's lives early begins to show itself. The worship of the dead naturally encourages good morals, for the ancestor who, while alive, saw that the members of his family did right by one another, and whose condition in the spirit-world is a continuation of his earthly character and rank, will naturally insist on this being continued when he is a divine ghost, powerful to favour or to punish. The world thus becomes regarded as the battle-ground of good and evil spirits, and from this follows naturally the idea of a dualism, or perpetual contest between good and evil, ranged under a supreme good and a supreme evil deity, which attains so great development in the ancient religion of Persia.
Animism, then, appears to the savage, on the evidence of his senses, to be a rational and fairly consistent philosophy, and it has maintained its place in higher civilisations. It is taught by Lucretius, when he makes his theory of film-like images of things (simulaera and membrane) account both for the apparitions which occur to men in dreams and the images which impress their minds in thinking; and when Democritus explained the facts of perception, by declaring that things are always throwing off images of themselves (eidôla), which enter the recipient soul, he was simply answering the fundamental question of metaphysics, by turning to a new purpose, as a method of explaining the phenomena of thought, the savage doctrine of object- souls. Animism is not a degeneracy from a higher culture. In it we find no survivals which show inconsistencies with itself; whereas, in all higher cultures, there occur survivals of primitive superstition, wholly inconsistent with the more advanced beliefs. Most primitive superstitions are found surviving, in modified form, in poetry and folk-lore, and often in common words and phrases, which have a meaning deeper than metaphor. Animism is not itself a religion, but a sort of primitive philosophy, which not only controls religion, but the whole life of the natural man. It represents a stage in the religious evolution which is still represented by the so-called Nature-religions, or rather by the polydæmonistic magic tribal religions, early developed among civilised nations into polytheistic national religions resting upon a traditional doctrine. See Tylor's Primitive Culture (2 vols. 1871), on which this article is mainly founded; also The Origin of Primitive Superstitions, by Rushton M. Dorman (Philadelphia, 1881).