These serpent memories, particularly the enduring image of that black
serpent which when recalled restores most vividly the emotion
experienced at the time, serve to remind me of a subject not yet
mentioned in my narrative: this is animism, or that sense of something
in nature which to the enlightened or civilized man is not there, and
in the civilized man's child, if it be admitted that he has it at all,
is but a faint survival of a phase of the primitive mind. And by
animism I do not mean the theory of a soul in nature, but the tendency
or impulse or instinct, in which all myth originates, to animate all
things; the projection of ourselves into nature; the sense and
apprehension of an intelligence like our own but more powerful in all
visible things. It persists and lives in many of us, I imagine, more
than we like to think, or more than we know, especially in those born
and bred amidst rural surroundings, where there are hills and woods
and rocks and streams and waterfalls, these being the conditions which
are most favourable to it--the scenes which have "inherited
associations" for us, as Herbert Spencer has said. In large towns and
all populous places, where nature has been tamed until it appears like
a part of man's work, almost as artificial as the buildings he
inhabits, it withers and dies so early in life that its faint
intimations are soon forgotten and we come to believe that we have
never experienced them.
Pages:
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261