To understand this fact, however, we must cast another glance at the oldest stage of Hebrew Religion, at which religion had not yet fully shaken itself free from mythology, but was closely united with it, and only beginning to have a separate form. Whatever be the psychological factors that produce the religious tendency in man—an attitude of the soul which can no longer be treated as congenital,—it must be regarded as established and certain that the psychological process of the origin of religion, a process influenced only in its most advanced stages by ethical and esthetic forces, is in the first instance developed out of the older mental activity which resulted in the creation of myths. After the exhaustion of the mental activity that forms myths, which is equivalent to the disappearance both of mythical productiveness and of vivid understanding of myths, men have no longer any consciousness of what may be called the etymology of the myth. Then the mythical figures begin to be individualised; and parallel with this process runs the linguistic phenomenon that polyonymy disappears and all the phases of meaning previously expressed by separate names are combined in one or a few. The various synonyms for Sun, Darkness, etc., which existed in the myth, lose their significance; the different names for these natural phenomena, in each of which one feature or element of them was expressed in language, succumb to one single name, which then comprises in itself all their features and elements. The names Helios and Shemesh take the place of all other designations created in myths for the phenomenon of the Sun. These other designations, e.g. on Hebrew ground Jephthah, Asher, Edom and others, forfeit the signification which they originally had when myths were formed, and instead thereof are individualised. These names become personal names, and the stories of which they are the subjects become events of society. Thus from physical stories arise stories of gods and heroes; thus the nomenclature of the Sun and the Darkness produces a host of names of gods and heroes. For the personages who are thus imagined are powerful celestials, and the forgotten processes of which the myth spoke preserve for some time their heavenly scene of action.