We had to mention this theory to have our exposition of animism complete; but it is too inadequate for the facts, and too universally abandoned to-day to demand that we stop any longer for it. In order to explain a fact as general as the religion of nature by an illusion, it would be necessary that the illusion invoked should have causes of an equal generality. Now even if misunderstandings, such as those of which Spencer gives some rare illustrations, could explain the transformation of the cult of ancestors into that of nature, it is not clear why this should be produced with a sort of universality. No psychical mechanism necessitated it. It is true that because of its ambiguity, the word might lead to an equivocation; but on the other hand, all the personal souvenirs left by the ancestor in the memories of men should oppose this confusion. Why should the tradition which represented the ancestor such as he really was, that is to say, as a man who led the life of a man, everywhere give way before the prestige of a word? Likewise, one should have a little difficulty in admitting that men were born of a mountain or a star, of an animal or a plant; the idea of a similar exception to the ordinary conceptions of generation could not fail to raise active resistance. Thus, it is far from true that the error found a road all prepared before it, but rather, all sorts of reasons should have kept it from being accepted. It is difficult to understand how, in spite of all these obstacles, it could have triumphed so generally.
The theory of Tylor, whose authority is always great, still remains. His hypotheses on the dream and the origin of the ideas of the soul and of spirits are still classic; it is necessary, therefore, to test their value.
First of all, it should be recognized that the theorists of animism have rendered an important service to the science of religions, and even to the general history of ideas, by submitting the idea of the soul to historical analysis. Instead of following so many philosophers and making it a simple and immediate object of consciousness, they have much more correctly viewed it as a complex whole, a product of history and mythology. It cannot be doubted that it is something essentially religious in its nature, origin and functions. It is from religion that the philosophers received it; it is impossible to understand the form in which it is represented by the thinkers of antiquity, if one does not take into account the mythical elements which served in its formation.