Also true is the fact that animals, because they do not possess a human soul, but are obviously animate creatures, must also possess something like a soul but have one that is by definition inferior to the one possessed by human beings. This accounts for the fact that human beings have a natural right to subjugate animals to their own will and use in much the same way that God does to man. On the first point, animistic people believe that everything has a spirit and that spirit is different for everything that is animated by it but that difference is never perceived or described in terms of hierarchical structure. In other words, the spirit that animates a tree is not better or worse than the one that animates a bird and the one that animates a bird is not inferior or superior to the one that animates a person. The difference, then, between one spirit and another is a difference of kind but never a difference of value or power.
Spirits do nothing except animate the body to which they are attached.
The difference between one person and another who share the same spirit arises from the individual personalities that the two people have. In other words, personality is essentially free from the influence of the spirit that animates the person who exhibits it. A final distinction, then, concerns the fate of the soul after a person dies. The spirit world is perceived more in terms of time than it is in terms of place. What this means is that people who have entered the spirit world, people who have died, continue to exist in the body of time which encloses their living reality from the moment of birth to the moment of death.