INTRINSIC LAW OF APPREHENSION. 145 



Primitive man did not take whiteness, for example, 

 considered in itself, to be an active subject, like the 

 specific natural myths which we have mentioned, 

 but he regarded it as something which had a real 

 existence, and he might under certain circumstances 

 invest it with deliberate power. 



If we have fully grasped this deep faculty of the 

 mind, and the spontaneous animation of all pheno- 

 mena, both external and internal, it will not be 

 difficult to understand the reappearance of the same 

 law in abstract conceptions. The sensation of the 

 quality, and consequently of the phenomenon, is 

 reproduced, and the phenomenon generates the im- 

 plicit idea of a subject, and therefore of a possible 

 cause in given circumstances. If such a law did not 

 produce upon man the mythical personification of his 

 primitive abstract conceptions, at any rate it involved 

 a belief in the objective reality of these conceptions, 

 which were implicitly held to possess an independent 

 existence. 



Among prehistoric and savage races, who were 

 ignorant of the laws and nature of cosmic forces, the 

 greater or less weight of a thing did not involve any 

 examination of the mass of a phenomenon, its dis- 

 tance, and the general laws of gravity ; this differential 

 weight was itself believed to be a thing which acted, 

 and sometimes deliberately acted in different ways on 

 the different objects which they were comparing at 

 the moment. In other words, gravity was regarded 



