_Primitive Animism._—Animism is the oldest and most primitive of the conceptions presented to the human mind. But in so far as it is a co-ordinated doctrine, it is the most recent. In fact it only received its definitive expression in the eighteenth century, from Stahl, the philosopher-physician and chemist. According to Tylor, one of the first speculations of primitive man, of the savage, is as to the difference between the living body and the corpse. The former is an inhabited house, the latter is empty. To such rudimentary intellects the mysterious inhabitant is a kind of _double_ or duplicate of the human form. It is only revealed by the shadow which follows the body when illuminated by the sun, by the image of its reflection in the water, by the echo which repeats the voice. It is only seen in a dream, and the figures which people and animate our dreams are nothing but these doubled, impalpable beings. Some savages believe that at the moment of death the double, or the soul, takes up its residence in another body. Sometimes each individual possesses, not one of these souls, but several. According to Maspero, the Egyptians counted at least five, of which the principle, the _ka_ or _double_, would be the aeriform or vaporous image of the living form. Space is peopled by souls on their travels, which leave one set of bodies to occupy another set. After having been the cause of life in the bodies which they animated, they react from without on other beings, and are the cause of all sorts of unexpected events. They are benevolent or malevolent spirits. Analogy inevitably leads simple minds to extend the same ideas to animals and plants; in a word, to attribute souls to everything alive, souls more or less nomadic, wandering, or interchangeable, as is taught in the doctrine of metempsychosis. Mons. L. Errera points out that this primitive, co-ordinated, hierarchized doctrine—meet subject for the poet’s art—is the basis of all ancient mythologies. _The Animism of Stahl._—Modern animism was much more narrow in scope. It was a medical theory—_i.e._ almost exclusive to man. Stahl had adopted it in a kind of reaction against the exaggerations of the mechanical school of his time. According to him, the life of the body is due to the intelligent and reasoning soul. It governs the corporeal substance and directs it towards an assigned end. The organs are its instruments. It acts on them directly, without intermediaries. It makes the heart beat, the muscles contract, the glands secrete, and all the organs perform their functions. Nay more, it is itself the architectonic soul, which has constructed and which maintains the body which it rules. It is the _mens agitat molem_ of Virgil.