Preanimism
PREANIMISM. In the years around 1900, the scholarly debate about the origins and evolution of religion was still in large measure dominated by the theories put forward by E. B. Tylor thirty years previously, notably in his Primitive Culture (London, 1871). The key concept was animism, which denoted both a primitive belief in spiritual beings and a belief in the "animation" of nonhuman beings—from the higher mammals down to trees, plants, and stones—by spirits or spirit forces. By 1900, however, Tylor's theory had been challenged by two of his Oxford disciples, both of whom were and remained his personal friends. In his Cock Lane and Common Sense (London, 1894) and definitively in his celebrated The Making of Religion (London, 1898), Andrew Lang had questioned the animistic hypothesis from one direction, suggesting that "perhaps there is no savage race so lowly endowed, that it does not possess, in addition to a world of 'spirits,' something that answers to the conception of God" (Cock Lane and Common Sense, p. 334). At a meeting of the British Association in 1899, the animistic theory was questioned from another direction, this time by the philosopher-anthropologist R. R. Marett. Whereas Lang was saying that adherents of the animistic theory had been prevented by their presuppositions from even noticing the evidence in favor of what he called "high gods" among peoples on a low level of material development, Marett claimed that the term animism was ambiguous and that the mental processes it assumed were too sophisticated to have been present at the lowest level of human evolution.
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