The Soul and Its Folklore

Thomas Firminger Thiselton-Dyer
21 pages (2008/1883); 212KB download
WOWIO Books; ISBN: WOWIO-00429

DESCRIPTION

This essay reviews “animistic beliefs of uncultured tribes” in a piece reflecting the perceptions and stereotypes of British society at the time this piece was written.

The author argues that “the leading principle respecting the soul, from the infancy of the world up to its present civilized state, has been that of ‘an animating, separable, surviving entity, the vehicle of individual personal existence.’ ” and that, by “a gradual process of evolution, the conception of the soul in modern culture may be regarded as the product of a religious philosophy originally coexistent with the earliest forms of psychology.”