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Phanteur, whole no. 1, January 1946
Page 4
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THIS ANIMATE WORLD by Donn Brazier In PONTIFEX, I mentioned briefly the concept that a oneness pervades the universe; in this article I shall advance some ideas to show that perhaps this basic reality, this oneness, is LIFE. One of the puzzles of science today remains unsolved: What is life? And where is the division point between the non-living and the living? It can be solved very easily,if either one or the other of the two is taken as the only reality. This article attempts to show that there is only on type of material and immaterial thing in the universe. If the stone is non-living, so then is man; if the man is living, so then is the stone. For reasons outside the scope of this article, I shall say that the stone is living. Animism as a primitive religion and quite possibly as a current philosophy is well recognized as being just that -- primitive. "To the savage there was nothing absurd in the idea that everything around him bore him malice, for he had not yet discovered that some things were inanimate. In the world he saw about him, all objects were animate: sticks, stones, storms, and and all else. He shied at each suspiciously, much as a horse shies suspiciously at bits of white paper by the roadside. And not merely were all things animate to the savage, but they were seething with emotions, too. Things could destroy him if they so willed, or they could let him alone." Lewis Browne, in THIS BELIEVING WORLD, further sttates that: "Perhaps as Professor George Foot Moore slyly reminds us, even civilized folk instinctive-ly cling to the primitive notion. Children angrily kick the tables against which they bump their heads, as though those tables were human. Grown men mutter oaths at the rugs over which they stumble, for all the world as though those rugs had intentionally tried to trip them. And it may be that young and old still do such irrational things only because even today there still lingers in the mind of man the savage notion that all objects are animate. When caught off his guard, man still is betrayed into trying to punish, either with a blow or with consignment to hell-fire, the inanimate objects that happen to cause him pain." Some ancient and contemporary religions of the world express varying degrees of animism in their belief or ritual. Consider the Egyptians with their terrifying animal gods, the early Greeks and Romans, Vishnu and Shiva of the Hindus, and animism of early Iran, and the rock, tree, and star gods of the bedouin tribes of Arabia. It is not this primitive type of animism which I wish to suggest as basic truth. It is essentially ridiculous for man to set up and worship symbols (which gods are) of the natural creative forces around him. Man seems able to comprehend the symbol without understanding the thing it represents. Prob-ably the closest religious belief to discard the symbol and worship the force is a pantheistic one; shorn of all worshipping and begging connotations perhaps pantheism would approximate the ideas this article will present. Why cannot man discard his god-symbols and worship (if worship he must) the force around him? One reason, at least, is that man exalts and worships his own mind. Theodore Dreiser in an article published in THE BEDSIDE ESQUIRE called "You, the Phantom" puts the idea well: "...after centuries and centuries of peeping and prying and arguing with this earthly authority and that; reading what has been or is being written by
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THIS ANIMATE WORLD by Donn Brazier In PONTIFEX, I mentioned briefly the concept that a oneness pervades the universe; in this article I shall advance some ideas to show that perhaps this basic reality, this oneness, is LIFE. One of the puzzles of science today remains unsolved: What is life? And where is the division point between the non-living and the living? It can be solved very easily,if either one or the other of the two is taken as the only reality. This article attempts to show that there is only on type of material and immaterial thing in the universe. If the stone is non-living, so then is man; if the man is living, so then is the stone. For reasons outside the scope of this article, I shall say that the stone is living. Animism as a primitive religion and quite possibly as a current philosophy is well recognized as being just that -- primitive. "To the savage there was nothing absurd in the idea that everything around him bore him malice, for he had not yet discovered that some things were inanimate. In the world he saw about him, all objects were animate: sticks, stones, storms, and and all else. He shied at each suspiciously, much as a horse shies suspiciously at bits of white paper by the roadside. And not merely were all things animate to the savage, but they were seething with emotions, too. Things could destroy him if they so willed, or they could let him alone." Lewis Browne, in THIS BELIEVING WORLD, further sttates that: "Perhaps as Professor George Foot Moore slyly reminds us, even civilized folk instinctive-ly cling to the primitive notion. Children angrily kick the tables against which they bump their heads, as though those tables were human. Grown men mutter oaths at the rugs over which they stumble, for all the world as though those rugs had intentionally tried to trip them. And it may be that young and old still do such irrational things only because even today there still lingers in the mind of man the savage notion that all objects are animate. When caught off his guard, man still is betrayed into trying to punish, either with a blow or with consignment to hell-fire, the inanimate objects that happen to cause him pain." Some ancient and contemporary religions of the world express varying degrees of animism in their belief or ritual. Consider the Egyptians with their terrifying animal gods, the early Greeks and Romans, Vishnu and Shiva of the Hindus, and animism of early Iran, and the rock, tree, and star gods of the bedouin tribes of Arabia. It is not this primitive type of animism which I wish to suggest as basic truth. It is essentially ridiculous for man to set up and worship symbols (which gods are) of the natural creative forces around him. Man seems able to comprehend the symbol without understanding the thing it represents. Prob-ably the closest religious belief to discard the symbol and worship the force is a pantheistic one; shorn of all worshipping and begging connotations perhaps pantheism would approximate the ideas this article will present. Why cannot man discard his god-symbols and worship (if worship he must) the force around him? One reason, at least, is that man exalts and worships his own mind. Theodore Dreiser in an article published in THE BEDSIDE ESQUIRE called "You, the Phantom" puts the idea well: "...after centuries and centuries of peeping and prying and arguing with this earthly authority and that; reading what has been or is being written by
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