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.

    29/420 (page 5)
    The ascription by primitive men of ghost-souls to animals, plants, and inert objects, is probably regarded as an extension of the theory first arrived at by reflection on the problem of human life. Such extension was rendered almost inevitable by the fact that persons met in dreams and visions, as well as the dreamer himself, seem to have about them their dogs, their weapons, their dress, and other material objects. It seems probable also that the ghost-soul of man was the first definite conception of personal intelligent powers, living and working in detachment from ordinary solid matter and all the narrow limitations of embodied existence. If so, the developments of ideas of other powers of a similar, but non-human, nature, i demons, gods, spirits good and evil of all sorts, must have been ! in large degree merely extensions and differentiations of this fundamental notion of the human ghost-soul.* 1 In various ages and places many variants of this primitive conception of the ghost-soul have been held ; some savages, for example, agree with certain philosophers of classical antiquity in assigning to each man two, three, or even four souls of different functions. But the diversities of the opinions of uncultured peoples on this great subject are far less striking than the uniformities ; and the theory of the ghost-soul is so widely distributed throughout all regions of the world, and gives so natural and satisfactory explanations of so many facts that force themselves upon the attention of men of every grade of culture, that we may suppose it to have been independently reached by I many peoples. So concordant is it with the way of thinking of unsophisticated mankind, that it has lived on up to the present day in the popularly accepted traditions of almost all the peoples of the world ; and every feature of the primitive conception is illustrated by practices and beliefs still current among the most highly civilized peoples of Europe. Even the belief in the materiality of the soul still finds expression in the custom of opening the door or window of the death-chamber to give free egress to the departing soul,2 and in the German superstition3 of them, is strong in most of us, and perhaps stronger in the men of primitive culture than in others. And this tendency m^ well have facilitated the develop¬ ment of the notion of the ghost-soul by reflection upon the facts of sleep, dream, trance, and death. 1 This is the view forcibly defended by Prof. W. Wundt in his Volker-psycho- logie (second edition, vol. iv. part i.), Leipzig, 1910. 3 “ Primitive Culture,” vol. i. p. 454. 3 Ibid., vol. i. p. 455.