154 MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



former, signifies an actual process of thought. We 

 therefore adopt the word without scruple, since new 

 words have often been coined before when they were 

 required to express new conceptions and theories. 



The primitive and constant act of all animals, 

 including man, when external or internal sensation 

 has opened to them the immense field of nature, is that 

 of cntifying the object of sensation, or, in a word, all 

 phenomena. Such entification is the result of spon- 

 taneous necessity, by the law of the intrinsic faculty 

 of perception ; it is not the result of reflection, but it 

 is immediate, innate, and inevitable. It is an eternal 

 law of the evolution of the intelligence, like all those 

 which rule the order of the world. 



We do not only proclaim in this fact a law of 

 psychological importance, but also the origin of myths, 

 and in a certain sense of science, since myth is 

 developed by the same methods as science. These 

 two streams flow from one and the same source, since 

 the entification of phenomena is proper both to myth 

 and science ; the former entifies sensations, and the 

 latter ideas, since science by reversion to law and 

 rational conception finally attains to the primitive 

 entity. And finally, if an imaginative idea of a cause 

 is active in myth from the first, the conception of 

 a cause is equally necessary to science. It is her 

 business to explain the reason of things, and in what 

 they rationally consist : 



" Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere cansas." 



