Body and mind : a history and a defense of animism / by William McDougall.

  • William McDougall
Date:
1920
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Body and mind : a history and a defense of animism / by William McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    28/420 (page 4)
    densed. He writes : “ It is a thin, unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapour, film, or shadow ; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates ; independently possess¬ ing the personal consciousness and volition of its corporeal owner, past or present; capable of leaving the body far behind, to flash swiftly from place to place; mostly impalpable and invisible, yet also manifesting physical power, and especially appearing to men waking or asleep as a phantasm separate from the body of which it bears the likeness ; continuing to exist and appear to men after the death of that body ; able to enter into, possess, and act in the bodies of other men, of animals, and even of things.” 1 Since the publication of “ Primitive Culture,” the origin of Animism has been the subject of much discussion and con¬ troversy ; but in their main outlines Dr Tylor’s account of the ghost-soul, and his theory of the genesis of the idea, seem to remain unshaken. Mr Andrew Lang has urged that waking hallucinations or apparitions (in common phrase, the seeing of ghosts) may have played an important part in developing the idea. Mr R. R. Marett 2 and others have attempted to describe a pre-animistic conception, which attributed an ill-defined power or virtue to all things that evoked awe in the mind of primitive man ; it is suggested that this notion was the common matrix from which ideas of the souls of men, animals, and plants, anthropo¬ morphic conceptions of natural forces, the ideas of gods and demons, in fact, all ideas of spiritual existences, have been differentiated. These are interesting suggestions which, in so far as they are accepted (and to me a strong case seems to be made out for both views), are to be regarded as supplementing Dr Tylor’s doctrine, rather than as conflicting with it.3 1 “ Primitive Culture,” third edition, vol. i. p. 429. 2 “ The Threshold of Religion,” London, 1908. 3 More recently Mr A. E. Crawley has published a work (“ The Idea of the Soul ”) in which he claims to have completely refuted Dr Tylor’s theory of the origin of the ghost - soul, and to have established a rival. To my Lind the weight of the arguments brought forward against Dr Tylor’s view is a negligible quantity, and the hypothesis proposed as an alternative seems highly improbable. Mr Crawley maintains that the visual images of waking life are the source from which primitive man derived his ideas of the souls of men and things, though this view cannot be seriously entertained as a sub¬ stitute for Dr lylor’s theory, it may, I think, be regarded as supplementing it, by drawing attention to a factor which may have played some considerable part m the genesis of the ghost-soul, and which, perhaps, has not been sufficiently taken into account. 1 he tendency to visualize our dead friends, when we think