consistent. . . . The soul has given up its ethereal substance, and become an immaterial entity, ‘the shadow of a shade’. Its theory is becoming separated from the investigations of biology and mental science, which now discuss the phenomena of life and thought, the senses and the intellect, the emotions and the will, on a groundwork of pure experience.”[1]
Avenarius’ treatment of animism has been approved in most unexpected quarters,[2] and on that account I have dwelt upon it at greater length. But surely if we were called upon to make a choice between Avenarius’ condemnation of animism as the source of all false metaphysics and Fechner’s idealisation of it as containing the germ of a final philosophy, we should be compelled to side with the latter. Animism is not the source of the distinction between soul and body but only the first and crudest attempt to comprehend and define their interrelations. To say, as Tylor and Avenarius both do, that the real grounds for the conception of the soul lie in primitive thinking, and that all later attempts to develop it fail to strengthen the grounds upon which it was adopted by the savage mind, is a grotesque misrepresentation of the history of human thought. Some distinction between self and not-self is present from the very start of human experience, and the philosophical value of animism may perhaps be regarded as chiefly consisting in the definiteness which it gave to that more primitive distinction—a definiteness which enabled it to take hold on the human mind and so ultimately to become a subject of scientific reflexion. As an opposition between soul and body it may or may not be tenable, as containing the germ of the distinction between mind and matter, thought and extension, it is indispensable for clearness in philosophical thinking. Avenarius’ attempt to remove the distinction by contending that with the advance of knowledge it has ceased to exist even as a problem has resulted in his own case in a one-sided materialism. In overcoming the opposition of subject and object he very seriously misrepresents it. When, on the one hand, he identifies the opposition of subject and object with the distinction between character and content, by using these new and quite general terms, and by describing character and content as inseparable aspects of every experience, he escapes
- ↑ Primitive Culture (1871), i., pp. 452-453. I have not been able to find any authoritative statement as to the extent of the influence which Tylor’s treatment of animism exercised on Avenarius. But that it was decisive in determining Avenarius’ conception of the main stages in the development of philosophy, and of human thought generally, seems fairly obvious.
- ↑ Cf. Ward in Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii., 172.
