"Dr. Levy-Bruhl presents a dramatic picture of the primitives who live in a world that is capricious, unpredictable, and unstable; under the power of spirits both good and evil, to be worshipped or propitiated by ceremonies, dances, and religious rites. Dr. Levy-Bruhl shows how the mind of the primitive has no conception of the world of abstract though, natural law, causation, and categories, which has been opened up to the mind by science and philosophy. In addition, the author explains omens, talismans, amulets, ancestor worship, witchcraft, insect, defilement, and purification as fundamental parts of the primitive existence. "--Provided by publisher.

Dr. Levy-Bruhl presents a dramatic picture of the primitives who live in a world that is capricious, unpredictable, and unstable; under the power of spirits both good and evil, to be worshipped or propitiated by ceremonies, dances, and religious rites. Dr. Levy-Bruhl shows how the mind of the primitive has no conception of the world of abstract though, natural law, causation, and categories, which has been opened up to the mind by science and philosophy. In addition, the author explains omens, talismans, amulets, ancestor worship, witchcraft, insect, defilement, and purification as fundamental parts of the primitive existence.

Often some one precious detail of war lurks in the middle of a book of the most unlikely description. After turning over tens of thousands of leaves in Latin, French, Italian, German, English, Spanish and Dutch print, one is left with an accumulation of observed phenomena - religious, cultural, literary, psychological - which the mind is forced to coordinate into some sort of general conclusions. As the author has stated in some of the pages which follow this preface, the author is profoundly averse to formulating 'philosophies of history', and though the author feels impelled to put in order the impression which much reading and pondering have left with me, the author does not pretend to link these impressions into any theory of evolution. There are as many 'ifs' in history as 'therefores'.

The Handbook of Contemporary Animism brings together an international team of scholars to examine the full range of animist worldviews and practices. The volume opens with an examination of recent approaches to animism. This is followed by evaluations of ethnographic, cognitive, literary, performative, and material culture approaches, as well as advances in activist and indigenous thinking about animism. This handbook will be invaluable to students and scholars of Religion, Sociology and Anthropology.

In the twenty years before and after 1900 Frank Byron Jevons, one of the last Victorian polymaths, gave himself successively to the study of classics, philosophy, sociology, history, anthropology, and comparative religion. He was also concerned with social and national issues, especially the education of the working classes and of women. This brief biography is an intellectual history in which each chapter explores specific themes in his life.