Children, savages and ourselves, in some degree, attribute spontaneously to _some_ inanimate things, in our mere apprehension of them (for this has nothing to do with the metaphysics of Pampsychism), something more than external existence: regarding them as force-things and, by empathy, as experiencing effort and quiescence, strain and relief, and sometimes emotion and pain. It is for this attitude toward nature that I adopt Mr. Marett’s term “animatism”: as not ascribing to inanimate things, or to plants, in general, anything like a human personal consciousness; but merely an obscure, fragmentary, partial consciousness, enough to correspond with our occasional experiences in dealing with them. Perhaps those observers who report in strong terms universal Animism as the tenet of a tribe, mean no more than this; for example, the author above quoted as writing in the _American Bureau of Ethnology_, who says (p. 433) that according to the Dakotas, everything—“the commonest sticks and clays”—has a spirit that may hurt or help and is, therefore, to be propitiated. It would be unjust to the adherents of psychological Animism to accuse them of believing that savages have universally made so much progress in “faculty Psychology” as to distinguish personality, will, passion and reason; especially as they add that savages project these powers into all natural objects through incapacity for discrimination and abstraction; and, at the same time, know very well that in some languages of the most animistic tribes (e. g. Algonquin and Naga) the distinction of animate and inanimate is the ground of grammatical gender. We find, accordingly, that some explorers explicitly deny that, in their experience, savages regard all things as on the same level of life, passion and reason. Dr. Coddrington says that, in the Banks’ Islands, yams and such things are not believed to have any _tarunga_ (spirit)—“they do not live with any kind of intelligence”;[164] and that Melanesians do not fail to distinguish the animate and the inanimate. Messrs. Skeat and Blagden report that with the Semang of the Malay Peninsula there is very little trace of animistic beliefs; and they relate a folk-tale of how a male elephant tells a female that he has found a live stone (pangolin rolled into a ball): “Swine,” said the female, “stones are never alive.”[165] Messrs. Hose and McDougall tell us that the Kayans hang garments and weapons on a tomb, and seem to believe that shadowy duplicates of these things are at the service of the ghost, but that such duplicates are inert (relatively) and not to be confused with the principle of intelligence.[166] “Soul” does not imply personality.