Let us briefly sum up the truth we have sought to establish. Special
fetishes first had their origin by the innate exercise and historical
development of the human intelligence, by the necessary conditions of
the perception, and of subsequent apprehension; these were only the
animation of each external or internal phenomenon, as it occurred, and
this was the primitive origin of myth, both in man and animals. In the
case of animals the fetish or special myth is transitory, appearing and
disappearing in accordance with his actual perceptions; while in man
there is a persistent image of the fetish in his mind, to which he
timidly ascribes the same power as to the thing itself. The specific
types of these fetishes naturally arise from the mental combination of
images, emotions, and ideas into a whole, and these impersonations
generate the various forms of anthropomorphic polytheism. As the
synthetic mental process goes on, these varied forms of polytheism are
gradually united in one general but still anthropomorphic form, which is
commonly called monotheism.
In addition to these spontaneous and anthropomorphic myths, which serve
for the fanciful explanation of the system of the world, and the moral
ideas of social and individual life, other myths arise which are not
anthropomorphic, but which ascribe a substantial existence to abstract
conceptions of physical, moral, or intellectual matters; conceptions
necessary for the formulation of human speech. For although primitive
languages, of which we have some examples remaining in the language of
savage peoples, are almost inconceivably concrete, yet speech is
impossible without expressions of form, or abstract conceptions which
are moulded and adapted to that intuition of the relations of things
which is always taking place in the mind.[27] The mythical human form
does not indeed appear in these conceptions, but a substantial entity is
involved in them which sometimes, as we have seen, may even assume the
aspect of a complete myth.
A careful analysis of the process of our intelligence has shown that
this habitual personification of the phenomenon or abstract conception
is due to the innate faculty of perception, since the appearance of any
phenomenon necessarily produces the idea of a subject actuated by
deliberate purpose; this law is equally constant in the case of animals,
in whom, however, it does not issue in a rational conception. The
objection of ourselves into nature, the personification of its phenomena
and myths in general, are common to all, while they take a more fanciful
form in the case of primitive man; they are the constant and necessary
result of the perception of external and internal phenomena. This
personification includes moral and intellectual as well as physical
phenomena, and it always proceeds in the same way, from special
phenomena to specific types, and hence to abstract perceptions.
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