HUMAN SENSATION AND PERCEPTION. 93 



bending the personified object presented to him. 

 The psychical image of his actual perception, -which 

 he has ascertained from experience to be beneficent 

 or malignant, or which has been interpreted as such 

 by his fancy, recurs to the mind even when it is 

 absent and remote, and it recurs in the vivid and 

 personified form in which it was first perceived. 



Hence come the following psychical facts. On 

 the one side the actual object which he has assumed 

 to be invested with the faculty of will still remains 

 to exert the same external influence ; on the other, 

 its personified image is also present to his mind, 

 so that he can regard it with the vivid quickness of 

 the fancy, and invest it, by its manifold relations to 

 other and various phenomena, with efficacy, force, and 

 mysterious purposes. It follows from this inward 

 action and emotion that while in the case of animals 

 the beneficent or malignant object is only invested 

 with life at the moment of perception, and has no 

 more efficacy after its disappearance, man on the 

 contrary retains the same personified object in his 

 memory, and recalls it at pleasure, so that its special 

 efficacy persists, and it continues to be the object of 

 hopes and fears either in the past or in the future. 

 In a word, the natural myth of animals is trans- 

 formed by man into a fetish, whether this object or its 

 corresponding image in his mind be superstitiously 

 regarded as good or evil, pleasing or terrible. 



This was the source of primitive, confused, and 



