Mr. Tylor, however, is chiefly concerned with Animism as ’an ancient and world-wide philosophy, of which belief is the theory, and worship is the practice.’  Given Animism, then, or the belief in spiritual beings, as the earliest form and minimum of religious faith, what is the origin of Animism?  It will be seen that, by Animism, Mr. Tylor does not mean the alleged early theory, implicitly if not explicitly and consciously held, that all things whatsoever are animated and are personalities.[10] Judging from the behaviour of little children, and from the myths of savages, early man may have half-consciously extended his own sense of personal and potent and animated existence to the whole of nature as known to him.  Not only animals, but vegetables and inorganic objects, may have been looked on by him as persons, like what he felt himself to be.  The child (perhaps merely because taught to do so) beats the naughty chair, and all objects are persons in early mythology.  But this feeling, rather than theory, may conceivably have existed among early men, before they developed the hypothesis of ‘spirits,’ ‘ghosts,’ or souls.  It is the origin of that hypothesis, ‘Animism,’ which Mr. Tylor investigates.

What, then, is the origin of Animism?  It arose in the earliest traceable speculations on ’two groups of biological problems: 

(1) ’What is it that makes the difference between a living body and a dead one; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, and death?’

(2) ’What are those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions?’[11]

Here it should be noted that Mr. Tylor most properly takes a distinction between sleeping ‘dreams’ and waking ‘visions,’ or ‘clear vision.’  The distinction is made even by the blacks of Australia.  Thus one of the Kurnai announced that his Yambo, or soul, could ‘go out’ during sleep, and see the distant and the dead.  But ’while any one might be able to communicate with the ghosts, during sleep, it was only the wizards who were able to do so in waking hours.’  A wizard, in fact, is a person susceptible (or feigning to be susceptible) when awake to hallucinatory perceptions of phantasms of the dead.  ’Among the Kulin of Wimmera River a man became a wizard who, as a boy, had seen his mother’s ghost sitting at her grave.’[12] These facts prove that a race of savages at the bottom of the scale of culture do take a formal distinction between normal dreams in sleep and waking hallucinations—­a thing apt to be denied.

Thus Mr. Herbert Spencer offers the massive generalisation that savages do not possess a language enabling a man to say ‘I dreamed that I saw,’ instead of ‘I saw’ (’Principles of Sociology,’ p. 150).  This could only be proved by giving examples of such highly deficient languages, which Mr. Spencer does not do.[13] In many savage speculations there occur ideas as subtly metaphysical as those of Hegel.  Moreover, even the Australian languages have the verb ‘to see,’ and the substantive ‘sleep.’  Nothing, then, prevents a man from saying ‘I saw in sleep’ (insomnium, [Greek:  enupnion]).