Now anthropological theories of the origin of religion seem to me to go wrong mainly because they seek to simplify too much.  Having got down to what they take to be a root-idea, they straightway proclaim it the root-idea.  I believe that religion has just as few, or as many, roots as human life and mind.

The theory of the origin of religion that may be said to hold the field, because it is the view of the greatest of living anthropologists, is Dr. Tylor’s theory of animism.  The term animism is derived from the Latin anima, which—­like the corresponding word spiritus, whence our “spirit”—­signifies the breath, and hence the soul, which primitive folk tend to identify with the breath.  Dr. Tylor’s theory of animism, then, as set forth in his great work, Primitive Culture, is that “the belief in spiritual beings” will do as a definition of religion taken at its least; which for him means the same thing as taken at its earliest.  Now what is a “spiritual being”?  Clearly everything turns on that.  Dr. Tylor’s general treatment of the subject seems to lay most of the emphasis on the phantasm.  A phantasm (as the etymology of the word shows) is essentially an appearance.  In a dream or hallucination one sees figures, more or less dim, but still having “vaporous materiality.”  So, too, the shadow is something without body that one can see; though the breath, except on a frosty day, shows its subtle but yet sensible nature rather by being felt than by being seen.  Now there can be no doubt that the phantasm plays a considerable part in primitive religion (as well as in those fancies of the primitive mind that have never found their way into religion, at all events into religion as identified with organized cult).  Savages see ghosts, though probably not more frequently than we do; they have vivid dreams, and are much impressed by their dream-experiences; and so on.  Besides, the phantasm forms a very convenient half-way house between the seen and the unseen; and there can be no doubt that the savage often says breath, shadow, and so forth, when he is trying to think and mean something immaterial altogether.

But animism would seem sometimes to be used by Dr. Tylor in a wider sense, namely, as “a doctrine of universal vitality.”  In dealing with the myths of the ruder peoples, as, for example, those about the sun, moon, and stars, he shows how “a general animation of nature” is implied.  The primitive man reads himself into these things, which, according to our science, are without life or personality.  He thinks that they have a different kind of body, but the same kind of feelings and motives.  But this is not necessarily to think that they are capable of giving off a phantasm, as a man does when his soul temporarily leaves him, or when after death his soul becomes a ghost.  There need be nothing ghost-like about the sun, whether it is imagined as a shining orb, or as a shining being of human shape to whom the orb belongs.  There is not anything in the least phantasmal about the Greek god Apollo.  I think, then, that we had better distinguish this wider sense of animism by a different name, calling it “animatism,” since that will serve at once to disconnect and to connect the two conceptions.