signifies a double sleep or dream, from _moe_, to sleep, and _piti_,
two. In New Zealand, _moenaku_ means, to try to grasp something during
sleep; from _naku_, to take in the fingers.
We can understand something of the mysterious exercise of human
intelligence in its earliest development from this habit of symbolizing
and presenting in an outward form an abstract conception, thus giving a
concrete meaning and material expression to the external fact. We see
how everything assumed a concrete, living form, and can better
understand the conditions we have established as necessary in the early
days of the development of human life. This attitude of the intelligence
has been often stated before, but in an incomplete way; the primitive
and the subsequent myths have been confounded together, and it has been
supposed that myth was of exclusively human origin, whereas it has its
roots lower down in the vast animal kingdom. We hope, therefore, that it
will be granted that we have given the true and full exposition of myth.
Anthropomorphism, and the personification of the things and phenomena of
nature, of their images and specific types, were the great source whence
issued superstitions, mythologies, and religions, and also, as we shall
presently see, the scientific errors to be found among all the families
of the human race.
For the development of myth, which is in itself always a human
personification of natural objects and phenomena in some form or other,
the first and necessary foundation consists, as we have abundantly
shown, in the conscious and deliberate vivification of objects by the
perception and apprehension of animals. And since this is a condition of
animal perception, it is also the foundation of all human life, and of
the spontaneous and innate exercise of the intelligence. In fact, man,
by a two-fold process, raises above his animal nature a world of images,
ideas, and conceptions from the types he has formed of various
phenomena, and his attitude towards this internal world does not differ
from his attitude towards that which is external. He personifies the
images, ideas, and conceptions by transforming them into living
subjects, just as he had originally personified cosmic objects and
phenomena.
In myths, since they owe their origin to the reflex power which is
gradually organized and developed, man carries on this faculty of
personification which had already been exerted in him as an animal. But
the object of myth became two-fold just as the animal nature became
duplex in man, whether as a special image of special conception, or as
an intellectual definition of the specific type already formed. The
myths are, therefore, from their very nature, either special, that is,
derived from the psychical duplication of a personified image; or they
are specific, and are derived, as we are about to explain, from the
personification of a type.
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