It Was Not Until Twelve Or Fourteen Years Later That I
Discovered That It Was Even As I Had Conjectured.
At a distance of
about forty miles from my home, or rather from the home of my boyhood
where
I no longer lived, I found a snake that was new to me, the
_Philodryas scotti_ of naturalists, a not uncommon Argentine snake,
and recognized it as the same species as the one found coiled up on my
little sister's rug and presumably as my mysterious black serpent.
Some of the specimens which I measured exceeded six feet in length.
CHAPTER XVII
A BOY'S ANIMISM
The animistic faculty and its survival in us - A boy's animism and its
persistence - Impossibility of seeing our past exactly as it was - Serge
Aksakoff's history of his childhood - The child's delight in nature
purely physical - First intimations of animism in the child - How it
affected me - Feeling with regard to flowers - A flower and my mother -
History of a flower - Animism with regard to trees - Locust-trees by
moonlight - Animism and nature-worship - Animistic emotion not
uncommon - Cowper and the Yardley oak - The religionist's fear of
nature - Pantheistic Christianity - Survival of nature-worship in
England - The feeling for nature - Wordsworth's pantheism and animistic
emotion in poetry.
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. That such a feeling can survive in any man, or
that there was ever a time since his infancy when he could have
regarded this visible world as anything but what it actually is - the
stage to which he has been summoned to play his brief but important
part, with painted blue and green scenery for background - becomes
incredible.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 126 of 186
Words from 66497 to 67023
of 98444
