We must briefly describe the evolution of these two mythical and scientific faculties of the mind; we must investigate the mode and cause of their divergence from a common source, through what transformations they pass, in order to see in what way the one is gradually dried up, while the other increases in volume and force. The reader must forgive us if we use some repetition in developing a subject on which we have already touched, since without such repetition the present historical explanation would be obscure. The first stage of knowledge consists in the observation of the things which surround us, and this first stage, which is necessary also in science, is the common property of animals. Their observation of themselves and of external things is psychologically and physiologically the same as that of man, and in both cases there is a subjective animation of the phenomena themselves. The primitive source of science in its observation of phenomena was the same as that of myth and of the special fetish; without such observation it would have had no existence. In immediate succession to this primitive fact, which is common to the whole animal kingdom, there arose--if we consider the general process without the limitations of circumstances, places, time, and a thousand accidents--two kinds of faculties which were identical in form, although they had different effects, and produced opposite results. For in the case of mythical entification the tendency to impersonation was always increasing and becoming more distinctly zoomorphic and anthropomorphic, and in this form it was crystallized or mummified, while science on the other hand was always enlarging its sphere and dissipating the first mythical form of its conception, until nothing was left but a purely rational idea. When this evolution takes place in peoples and races which are incapable of improvement, or have a limited capacity for advanced civilization, the faculty of myth remains in the ascendant; and as past and present history shows, mythical stagnation and intellectual barrenness may follow, until intellectual development is arrested and even destroyed. If on the other hand the evolution takes place in peoples and races capable of indefinite civilization, myth gradually disappears and science shines forth victoriously.