"Animistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... then the laws of nature will begin to dawn upon thought. Every experiment will become a lesson, every event will be remembered as favourable or unfavourable to the master-passion. At first, indeed, this keen observation will probably be animistic and the laws discovered will be chiefly habits, human or divine, special favours or envious punishments and warnings. But the same constancy of aim which discovers the dramatic conflicts composing society, and tries to read nature in terms of passion, will, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... no great persuasion was needed to turn a simple, imaginative, fatalistic people from a few vague animistic deities to the systematic iconology and the elaborate ritual of the Spanish Church. An obscure Bathala or a dim Malyari was easily superseded by or transformed into a clearly defined Dios, and in the case of any especially tenacious "demon," ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... is difficult in practice to distinguish the two phases of thought and no clear account of animatism can yet be given, largely on the ground that no people has yet been discovered which has not already developed to a greater or less extent an animistic philosophy. On theoretical grounds it is probable that animatism preceded animism; but savage thought is no more consistent than that of civilized man; and it may well be that animistic and panthelistic doctrines are held simultaneously by the same person. In like manner one portion ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... animals are only human beings in disguise is an axiom in the fairy tales. Animals are humanized, that is, the kinship between animal and human life is still keenly felt, and this reminds us of those early animistic interpretations of nature which subsequently led to ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... this view, the majority of superstitious fancies are of animistic origin. These include, not only many methods of primitive psycho-therapy, but also the belief in goblins, haunted houses, and ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... the progress upwards from savagery men of the same generation do not march abreast; and though the new anthropomorphic gods may satisfy the religious wants of the more developed intelligences, the backward members of the community will cling by preference to the old animistic notions. Now when the spirit of any natural object such as the corn has been invested with human qualities, detached from the object, and converted into a deity controlling it, the object itself is, by the withdrawal of its spirit, left inanimate; it becomes, so to say, a ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... endurance, power of offence in horn, hoof, claw, tooth, nail, scale and fiery breath. Being the embodiment of all force the dragon is especially symbolical of the emperor. Usually associated with malevolence, one sees, besides the conventional art and literature of civilization, the primitive animistic idea of men to whose mind this mysterious universe had no unity, who believed in myriad discordant spirits but knew not of "one Law-giver, who is able both to save and to destroy." An enlargement, possibly, of prehistoric man's reminiscence of now extinct monsters, ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis |
