150 MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



pause to consider the simple and logical value of their 

 expressions. We are only giving the natural history 

 of the intelligence, which necessarily excludes the 

 analytic and refining processes of rational science. 

 An educated man will, for example, say or write 

 that identity is a most important principle of logic 

 as well as that of contradiction, although he is per- 

 fectly aware that such expressions only imply an 

 abstract form of cognition ; he follows the natural and 

 primitive process of the intellect, and for the moment 

 expresses these conceptions as if they were real 

 entities in the organism of science and of the world. 

 Any one may find a proof of this fact in himself, 

 if he will consider the ideas immediately at work 

 in his mind at the moment of expressing similar 

 conceptions. And if this is true of those who pursue 

 a rational course of thought, it is true in a still 

 more imaginative and mythical sense at the dawn 

 of intellectual life, both among modern savages and 

 in the case of the ignorant common people. 



Let us briefly sum up the truth we have sought to 

 establish. Special fetishes first had their origin by 

 the innate exercise and historical development of the 

 human intelligence, by the necessary conditions of 

 the perception, and of subsequent apprehension ; 

 these were only the animation of each external or 

 internal phenonemon, as it occurred, and this was 

 the primitive origin of myth, both in man and 

 animals. In the case of animals the fetish or special 



