INTRINSIC LAW OF APPREHENSION. 151 



myth is transitory, appearing and disappearing in 

 accordance with his actual perceptions ; while in man 

 there is a persistent image of the fetish in his mind, 

 to which he timidly ascribes the same power as to the 

 thing itself. The specific types of these fetishes natur- 

 ally arise from the mental combination of images, 

 emotions, and ideas into a whole, and these imperson- 

 ations generate the various forms of anthropomorphic 

 polytheism. As the synthetic mental process goes 

 on, these varied forms of polytheism are gradually 

 united in one general but still anthropomorphic form, 

 which is commonly called monotheism. 



In addition to these spontaneous and anthropomor- 

 phic myths, which serve for the fanciful explanation 

 of the system of the world, and the moral ideas of 

 social and individual life, other myths arise which 

 are not anthropomorphic, but which ascribe a sub- 

 stantial existence to abstract conceptions of physical, 

 moral, or intellectual matters ; conceptions necessary 

 for the formulation of human speech. For although 

 primitive languages, of which we have some examples 

 remaining in the language of savage peoples, are 

 almost inconceivably concrete, yet speech is im- 

 possible without expressions of form, or abstract 

 conceptions which are moulded and adapted to that 

 intuition of the relations of things which is always 

 taking place in the mind.* The mythical human 



" In Chinese, for example, and in many other languages, there are 

 many words to indicate the tail of a fish, a bird, etc., but no word for a 



