Publisher's Synopsis
From the introductory chapter.
1. When unaffected by European ideas, the great majority of the American Indians of both continents are unquestionably animists. Indeed, all of them must be so classed if we take the word 'animist' in the broad sense given to it by Mr. Tylor; and even after we have made-as we must make-some discrimination of the very different grades of speculative power which the term implies, it is still to be borne in mind that only in a broad way do these grades distinguish different races and peoples. While, of course, the lowest tribes are fairly uniform in their ways of thought, yet the most advanced peoples, as those of Mexico and Peru, are by no means wholly freed from primitive ideas; along with philosophic theologies they retain instinctive superstitions, and their mental attitudes (like our own) must be conceived rather as a congregation of vaguer and distincter insights than as systematic unfoldments of their clearest point of view. The human mind may be likened to a forest tree: at the summit, in the clear light of day, is the greenest and most vigorous foliage, the proper source of the tree's strength; but far down the shade are still verdant the boughs of an earlier growth; and the lower trunk is still cumbered with dying branches and marked by ancient scars.
2. Primitive or instinctive animism (the "zoonism" of Mr. Stuart-Glennie, the "hecastotheism" of Major Powell) is that stage where nature is simply regarded as living, in all her manifestations, without reflection, without personification; the inanimate has never suggested itself as a possibility, and the feeling of nature's animation has never risen to the idea of personality.
Typical of such a mental state are the almost unorganized hordes of wandering savages of the South American forests. Doubtless the rivers, trees, and beasts which form their environing world seem to them endowed with the same sort of irresponsible instincts and desires as their own, but it is misleading to speak of such a consciousness as a recognition of spiritual life or as in any distinctive sense religious. Garcilasso de la Vega, describing the Indians of pre-Inca times, says that among these tribes were Indians "little better than tamed beasts and others who were worse than the most savage animals." They adored, he says, herbs and flowers and 'trees, beasts, birds, reptiles, fishes, huge stones and little pebbles, high mountains, caverns, deep precipices, the earth and its rivers, fire, natural prodigies....
