its development, but rather constantly to advance towards a more and more definite, more and more exact, appreciation both of the opposition between self and not-self and of their interrelations. At no stage is the development describable as a transition from a consistent and true experience to an impossible or illegitimate dualism. If at certain stages duality, such as that of soul and body in the animistic theories, is unduly emphasised, it can be said with equal truth that in the preceding stages the duality was unduly ignored. A duality that leads through animism to the idealism of Plato can only be reckoned an illegitimate development of thought by those who, like Avenarius, advocate a purely naturalistic interpretation of spiritual experience. His attempt to give logical and conclusive proof of its illegitimacy by his theory of the introjectionist argument has certainly failed. In so far as introjection goes beyond the distinction between my experience and the experience of others, that is to say, beyond the hypothesis implied in the attitude of pure experience,[1] it is not involved in animism. For, as we have just seen, though animism modifies the attitude of pure experience, the opposition which it develops is not between inner experience and the outer world, but only between an inner and an outer body. Also—to indicate a further important point—animism in its development is not determined by the introjectionist argument. For it does not originate in any fallacious inference from others to the self, but spontaneously arises as the natural explanation of a very special set of concrete phenomena—those of sleep, dreams and death. As Tylor has by reference to these concrete facts accounted for it in a satisfactory manner, a second explanation is quite superfluous.
Avenarius’ conception of the part which animism has played in the development of thought is as unsatisfactory as his attempted explanation of its origin by means of introjection. His position is entirely motived by the desire to trace all the higher conceptions of religion and philosophy back to the animistic belief in visions of the dead, and so to condemn them as Aberglaube, as ‘the shadow of a shade’. From this point of view Avenarius seeks to interpret the progress of philosophy as an inevitable development of animism through more and more subtilised forms of spiritualism back to naturalism. Philosophy, as it develops the conception of spirit, passes by completion of the dualism between it and all the objects of possible experience into
- ↑ Cf. previous article, p. 15.
