Produced by R. Cedron, Janet Blenkinship and the Online Distributed Proofreaders Europe at http://dp.rastko.net THE INTERNATIONAL SCIENTIFIC SERIES. VOL. XXXVIII. MYTH AND SCIENCE AN ESSAY BY TITO VIGNOLI THIRD EDITION LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., 1 PATERNOSTER SQU. 1885 CONTENTS. ON IDEAS AND SOURCES OF MYTH 1 ANIMAL SENSATION AND PERCEPTION 48 HUMAN SENSATION AND PERCEPTION 68 THE STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM 104 THE ANIMAL AND HUMAN EXERCISE OF THE INTELLECT ON THE PERCEPTION OF THINGS 116 INTRINSIC LAW OF THE FACULTY OF APPREHENSION 135 THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF MYTH AND SCIENCE 155 ON DREAMS, ILLUSIONS, NORMAL AND ABNORMAL HALLUCINATIONS, DELIRIUM, AND MADNESS--CONCLUSION 241 MYTH AND SCIENCE. CHAPTER I. THE IDEAS AND SOURCES OF MYTH. Myth, as it is understood by us, and as It will be developed and explained in this work, cannot be defined in summary terms, since its multiform and comprehensive nature embraces and includes all primitive action, as well as much which is consecutive and historical in the intelligence and feelings of man, with respect to the immediate and the reflex interpretation of the world, of the Individual, and of the society in which our common life is passed. We hold that myth is, in its most general and comprehensive nature, the spontaneous and imaginative form in which the human intelligence and human emotions conceive and represent themselves and things in general; it is the psychical and physical mode in which man projects himself into all those phenomena which he is able to apprehend and perceive.[1] We do not propose to consider in this treatise the myths peculiar to one people, nor to one race; we do not seek to estimate the intrinsic value of myths at the time when they were already developed among various peoples, and constituted into an Olympus, or special religion; we do not wish to determine the special and historical cause of their manifestations in the life of any one people, since we now refrain from entering on the field of comparative mythology. It is the scope and object of our modest researches to trace the strictly primitive origin of the human myths as a whole; to reach the ultimate fact, and the causes of this fact, whence myth, in its necessary and universal form, is evolved and has its origin.