[20] Animism has been defined by Dr Tylor as "the doctrine of spiritual beings, including human souls"; but the term is often extended to include animatism, "the doctrine that the great part if not the whole of the inanimate kingdom as well as all animated beings are endowed with reason, intelligence, and volition, identical with that of man."
[21] "We have no opportunity of observing historically man's development from blank unbelief into even the minimum or most rudimentary form of belief. We can only theorise and make more or less plausible conjectures as to the first rudiments of human faith in God and in spiritual beings. We find no race whose mind as to faith is a tabula rasa." (Lang, The Making of Religion, p. 53.)
[22] Tylor supposes animism to have arisen from "two groups of biological problems present to the mind of early man:
"(1) What is it 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?" (Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 428.)
[24] The term 'fetishism' has been objected to upon the ground that "it has been used in so many different and contradictory senses that it is very likely to be misunderstood. ... Even the word fetish should only be used in its historic sense, to describe a limited class of magical objects in West Africa." (Handbook of Folklore, p. 298.) This objection is scarcely a practical one, and to eliminate a word which has rendered excellent service to anthropology and has been adopted by students in all parts of the world to designate a definite class of religious objects and the especial description of the cult which clusters round them savours of pedantic caprice, while no equivalent is tendered for the word it is proposed to abolish.
[25] The jinn inhabiting Aladdin's lamp and ring appear to have been fetishistic spirits of this type.
[26] Well-known instances of assault upon gods are: the overthrow of the discredited Russian god, Peroun, by his disillusioned worshippers; the profanation of Balder's grove by Frithjof (Frithjof Saga); the destruction of the idols of the Mexican gods, Uitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, by the Spanish conquerors. Other instances could be cited, nearly all acts of insanity, rashness, or hostility, rarely of disappointment.
[27] See Gomme, Ethnology in Folklore, for several notable instances of stone-worship of this description.