Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Of, pertaining to, embracing, or founded on animism in any sense.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Of or pertaining to animism.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Of or pertaining to animism.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective of or pertaining to the doctrine of animism

Etymologies

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Examples

  • The word animistic should have been animalistic ... by

    A Lipstick on a Pig Campaign Metaphor; McCain's Biggest Staff Budget-- Make-up Artist 2008

  • An entirely different class of ideas, also termed animistic, is the belief in the world soul, held by Plato, Schelling and others.

    Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 Various

  • Thus we have evidence of the existence in pre-Buddhist India of rites and beliefs — the latter chiefly of the kind called animistic — disowned for the most part by the Buddhists and only tolerated by the Brahmans.

    Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 1 Charles Eliot 1896

  • My feeling is that the implicit function is the inculcation of abstract systematic thinking - which is necessary for modernizing societies, but is not a spontaneous human attribute (we are naturally 'animistic').

    School Reform, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty 2009

  • If this spectacle amazes one to-day, what emotions must it not have aroused in the breasts of the earlier folk, whose outlook on the world was so much more direct than ours -- more 'animistic' if you like!

    Pagan and Christian creeds: their origin and meaning Edward Carpenter 1886

  • His enthusiasm of knowledge is literally an enthusiasm: has about it that character of possession of one person by another, by which those "animistic" old Greeks explained natural madness.

    Plato and Platonism Walter Pater 1866

  • Familiaris, though they attained great dignity of conception, and were the centre of the family life, and to some extent of the family morality, never quite rose to the position of full-grown gods; while among the spirits of the field the wildness and impishness of character associated with Faunus and his companion Inuus -- almost the cobolds or hobgoblins of the flocks -- reflects clearly the old 'animistic' belief in the natural evilness of the spirits and their hostility to men.

    The Religion of Ancient Rome Cyril Bailey 1914

  • The term Animism may, as far as I can see, be quite well applied to the social affiliation, for the latter is evidently only a case in which the individual projects his own degree of consciousness into the human group around him instead of into the animals or the trees, but it is a case of which the justice is so obvious that the modern man can intellectually seize and understand it, and consequently he does not tar it with the 'animistic' brush.

    Pagan and Christian creeds: their origin and meaning Edward Carpenter 1886

  • a pithy essay on the irrelevance of the notion of authenticity and the "animistic" attitude that has taken shape in response to the boundless online population of modified images;

    Rhizome Inclusive: News, Blog, and Digest Brian Droitcour 2009

  • There, the primitive mind practiced animistic shamanism.

    The Bushman Way of Tracking God PhD Bradford Keeney 2010

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