Even stones have spirits inside them...

Pasztory is, of course, talking here about Aztec stone artefacts that have been worked into figures and monuments, but the principle remains the same. James Maffie, in his heavyweight tome Aztec Philosophy, spells out the basis of Aztec animism:-
’First, to exist (to be) is to be alive (or animated) in the sense of being energised, vitalised, or empowered. Second, to exist and to be alive is to move, act, change, transform, affect, and be affected. Things change, move, and affect both themselves and other things by dint of their animating energy...
’From this it follows that everything - from rocks, mountains, earth, water, fire, wind, sun, buildings, works of art, weapons, tools, games and musical instruments to insects, plants, incense, tobacco, pulque, animals, and humans - is literally animated, empowered and vivified.’
Such concepts and beliefs have been carried through to modern Nahua society; the Mexican anthropologist Arturo Gómez Martínez argues that today’s Nahuatl speakers in the Huasteca region of Veracruz believe in a form of animism in which ‘all existing things on earth and in the cosmos possess una fuerza, an energy, vigour or force, that provides them with life, but not a life like that of humans, but an eternal life that only comes to and end with the destruction of the universe’.

A coral skeleton from the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System, Quintana Roo, Mexico