Founder : British anthropologist Sir Edward B. Tylor Definition from him : 1.

the most primitive stage in the evolution of religion. 2. a general belief in spiritual beings and considered it 'a minimum definition of religion. 3. the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general. 4. an idea of pervading life and will in nature

According to him : all religions from the simplest to the most complex shared some sort of animistic belief. primitive peoples (defined as those without a written tradition) believed the spirits or souls caused life in human beings. They pictured these souls as vapours or shadows going from one body to another. The souls not only passed between human beings but into, plants, animals and inanimate (non-living) objects as well. primitive man arrived at his animistic belief to help him explain the causes of sleep, dreams, and death to distinguish the difference between them.

However, Tylor was criticized by another British anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett (1866-1943). He stated : primitive man had not developed the intellectual to form even such simplistic explanations as Tylor proposed. early religion was more emotional and intuitional in origin. early man recognized some inanimate objects because they had some particular characteristic or behaved in some unusual way which mysteriously made them seem alive. early man treated all animate objects as having a life and will of their own, but they never distinguished the soul as separate from the body, and could enter or leave the body. Marett conceded early man possessed the belief of animism, but it developed from the idea that some objects seemed to be alive like man.

Tylor's theory Early humans initially, through mere observation, recognized what might be called a figure which would appear in dreams and visions. These early human cultures later interpreted these spirits to be present in animals, the living plant world, and even in natural objects in a form of animism. Eventually, these early humans grew to believe that the spirits were invested and interested in human life, and performed rituals to propitiate them. These rituals and beliefs eventually evolved over time into the vast array of developed religions.

In animism, Tylor finds an explanation for funeral rites and customs--feasts of the dead, the human sacrifices of widows in India, the slaughtering of the Pawnee's horse and of the Arab's camel at the graves of their masters, placing food and weapons in, or on, the tomb--customs which survive in the practice of burning paper messengers and placing stone, clay, or wooden substitutes on graves in China and Japan.

Herbert Spencer : Spencer's well-known theroy which finds the origin of religion in the worship of ancestors appearing in the form of ghosts. This Herbert Spencer believed to be the most primitive form of religion. Animism is not original but derivative, being a generalized form of the belief in the spirits of dead ancestors reappearing as ghosts and choosing certain objects in Nature as their dwelling-place.