[70] Eyre, Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, ii. 355.
[71] Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons, ii. 163.
[72] Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa, i. 413.
Whilst belief in supernatural agents endowed with a will made the savage an animist, the idea that a mind presupposes a body, when thought out, led to anthropomorphism. Impossible as it is to imagine a will without a mind, it is hardly less impossible to imagine a mind without a body. The immaterial soul is an abstraction to which has been attributed a metaphysical reality, but of which no clear conception can be formed. As Hobbes observed, the opinion that spirits are incorporeal or immaterial, “could never enter into the mind of any man by nature; because, though men may put together words …. as Spirit and Incorporeall; yet they can never have the imagination of anything answering to them.”[73] Descartes himself frankly confessed, “What the soul itself was I either did not stay to consider, or, if I did, I imagined that it was something extremely rare and subtile, like wind, or flame, or ether, spread through my grosser parts.”[74] The supernatural agents were consequently of necessity considered to possess a more or less material constitution. The disembodied human soul which the savage saw in dreams or visions, in the shadow or the reflection, was only the least material being which he could imagine; and when raised to the dignity of an ancestor-god, it by no means lost its materiality, but, on the contrary, tended to acquire a more substantial body.
[73] Hobbes, op. cit. i. 12, p. 80.
[74] Descartes, Meditationes, 2, p. 10.
Of a grosser substantiality and very unlike the human shape are the inanimate objects of nature which receive divine veneration. It has been said of savages that they do not worship the thing itself, only the spirit dwelling in it. But such a distinction cannot be primitive. The natural object is worshipped because it is believed to possess supernatural power, but it is nevertheless the object itself that is worshipped.[75] Castrén, who combined great personal experience with unusual acuteness of judgment, states that the Samoyedes do not know of any spirits attached to objects of nature, but worship the objects as such; “in other words, they do not separate the spirit from the matter, but adore the thing in its totality as a divine being.”[76] Of the deification of the Nerbudda river Sir W. H. Sleeman likewise observes, “As in the case of the Ganges, it is the river itself to whom they address themselves, and not to any deity residing in it, or presiding over it—the stream itself is the deity which fills their imaginations, and receives their homage.”[77] The animist who endows an inanimate object with a soul regards the visible thing itself as its body.[78] How a being with such a body, like a tree or a stone, can hear the words of men, can see their doings, and can partake of the food they offer, might be difficult to explain—if it had to be explained. But, as I have said, the inquisitiveness of savage curiosity does not go to the roots of things, and religion is in its essence mystery.
[75] Cf. Tiele, Max Müller und Fritz Schultze über ein Problem der Religionswissenschaft, p. 35; Parkman, op. cit. p. lxvii. (North American Indians).
[76] Castrén, op. cit. iii. 192. Cf. ibid. iii. 161, 200 sq.
[77] Sleeman, Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official, i. 20.