Animism - Science and Animism

Science and Animism

Some early scientists such as Georg Ernst Stahl (1659-1734) and Francisque Bouillier (1813–1899) had supported a form of animism which life and mind, the directive principle in evolution and growth, holding that all cannot be traced back to chemical and mechanical processes, but that there is a directive force which guides energy without altering its amount. An entirely different class of ideas, also termed animistic, is the belief in the world soul anima mundi, held by philosophers such as Schelling and others. In the early 20th century William McDougall defended a form of animism in his book Body and Mind: A History and Defence of Animism (1911).

The physicist Nick Herbert has argued for "quantum animism" in which mind permeates the world at every level. Werner Krieglstein wrote regarding his quantum animism:

Herbert's quantum animism differs from traditional animism in that it avoids assuming a dualistic model of mind and matter. Traditional dualism assumes that some kind of spirit inhabitats a body and makes it move, a ghost in the machine. Herbert's quantum animism presents the idea that every natural system has an inner life, a conscious center, from which it directs and observes its action.

The terms animism and panpsychism have become related in recent years. The biologist Rupert Sheldrake has supported a form of animism which David Skrbina calls "a unique form of panpsychism". Sheldrake in his book The Rebirth of Nature: New Science and the Revival of Animism (1991) has claimed that Morphic fields "animate organisms at all levels of complexity, from galaxies to giraffes, and from ants to atoms". In his book The Science Delusion (2012) he wrote that the philosophy of the organism (organicism) has updated the ideas of animism as it treats all of nature as alive.