besides its own, or even bodies of a different kind to its own, and hence these
may be only apparent exceptions to the rule that the soul should be the
counterpart of its own embodiment.^81
“Among races within the limits of savagery, the general doctrine of souls is
found worked out with remarkable breadth and consistency. The souls of
animals are recognised by a natural extension from the theory of human souls;
the souls of trees and plants follow in some vague, partial way, and the souls of
inanimate objects expand the general category to its extremest boundary.”^82
To the Malay who has arrived at the idea of a generally animated Nature, but has
not yet learned to draw scientific distinctions, there appears nothing remarkable
or unnatural in the idea of vegetation-souls, or even in that of mineral-souls—
rather would he consider us Europeans illogical and inconsistent were he told
that we allowed the possession of souls to one half of the creation and denied it
to the other.
Realising this, we are prepared to find that the Malay theory of Animism
embraces, at least partially, the human race,^83 animals^84 and birds,^85
vegetation^86 (trees and plants), reptiles and fishes,^87 until its extension to inert
objects, such as minerals,^88 and “stocks and stones, weapons, boats, food,
clothes, ornaments, and other objects, which to us are not merely soulless, but
lifeless,” brings us face to face with a conception with which “we are less likely
to sympathise.”
Side by side with this general conception of an universally animate nature, we
find abundant evidences of a special theory of Human Origin which is held to
account not only for the larger mammals, but also for the existence of a large
number of birds, and even for that of a few reptiles, fishes, trees and plants, but
seems to lose its operative force in proportion to its descent in the scale of
creation, until in the lowest scale of all, the theory of Human Origin disappears
from sight, and nothing remains but the partial application of a few vague
anthropomorphic attributes.^89 It is, doubtless, to the prevalence of this theory
that we owe the extraordinary persistence of anthropomorphic ideas about
animals, birds, reptiles, trees, if not of minerals, in Malay magical ceremonies;^90
and it is hard to say which of these two notions—the theory of Human Origin, or
the other theory of Universal Animism—is to be considered the original form of