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animism

A Dictionary of Psychology

animism n.
1. The ascription of psychological attributes such as desires and intentions to plants, inanimate objects, or natural phenomena. The term was first used in this sense by the British social anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) in his book Primitive Culture (1871) to describe the beliefs of the ‘ruder tribes’ of India, who believed, for example, that the sun shines in order to provide warmth. Although the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) criticized such usage in 1910 in his book Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures (translated into English under the less provocative title How Natives Think), the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) adopted the term to describe the thinking of children who have not yet learned to distinguish animate from inanimate objects and popularized this usage in his book La Représentation du Monde chez l'Enfant (The Child's Conception of the World), first published in 1926. According to Piaget, animistic thinking undergoes four stages of development: first, between 4 and 6 years of age, children believe that everything is alive; second, between 6 and 7 years, they believe that everything that moves is alive; third, between 8 and 10 years, they believe that everything that moves by itself is alive; and fourth, from about 11 years, they distinguish correctly between animate and inanimate objects. The ascription of specifically human attributes to non-human animals and objects is a form of animism called anthropomorphism.

2. The doctrine that the soul is the vital principle (anima mundi) on which all organic development depends, propounded most influentially by the German physician Georg Ernst Stahl (1660–1734) in his book Theoria Medica Vera in 1707.

3. A doctrine promoted by the Greek philosophers Pythagoras (?580–?500 BC) and Plato (?427–?347 BC) according to which an immaterial force organizes and animates the material world.

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© A Dictionary of Psychology 2001, originally published by Oxford University Press 2001.

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