8 MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



tire facts in the new life of the individual. By this law, 

 the psychical facts, whether elementary or complex, as 

 they occur in the individual up to the point of their 

 evolution, have the necessary conditions of possibility, 

 and may therefore be termed a priori with respect to 

 the laws of evolution, and to the hereditary per- 

 manence of acts performed in the former environment 

 of the organism at the time when they appeared. 



This conception of a priori is, it must be admitted, 

 very different from that of transcendental philo- 

 sophers, who seek to prove either that an independent 

 artificer has not only produced the various organic 

 forms in their present complexity, and has specially 

 provided the spiritual subject with its category of 

 thought, independently of all experience ; or else 

 they assert the intrinsic existence of such forms in 

 the spirit, from the beginning of time. 



In this way, as we have already said, we must not 

 only collect the facts which abound in history and 

 ethnology respecting the general teaching of myths, 

 but we must also observe introspectively, and by 

 pursuing the experimental method, the primitive and 

 fundamental psychical facts, so as to discover the 

 a priori conditions of the myth itself. "\Yc must 

 ascertain, from a careful psychological examination, 

 the absolutely primitive origin of all mythical repre- 

 sentations, and how these are in their turn the actual 

 historical result of the same conditions, as they existed 

 prior to their manifestations. 



