162 MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



accepting these ideas, adduces two somewhat similar 

 instances of the behaviour of dogs. It seems to us 

 that these great men are mistaken on the one hand 

 in assuming that the first essential origin of myth is 

 not to be found in the animal kingdom, and on the 

 other in supposing that these facts have only an 

 accidental value, and that animals only occasionally 

 acquire a vague consciousness of the fetish. 



Those readers who have gone with us so far will 

 perceive that these were not mere accidents of rare 

 occurrence in animal life, ' but that they are the 

 necessary effect of mythical representation in its first 

 stage, although they cannot in any way be supposed 

 to be produced by fetishism, properly so called. For 

 if the dog were frightened and agitated by the move- 

 ment of the umbrella, or ran away, as Herbert 

 Spencer tells us, from the stick which had hurt him 

 while he was playing with it, it was because an un- 

 usual movement or pain produced by an object to 

 which habit had rendered him indifferent, aroused in 

 the animal the congenital sense of the intentional 

 subjectivity of phenomena, and this is really the 

 first stage of myth, and not of its subsequent form of 

 fetishism. 



I must therefore repeat that the first form of 

 myth which spontaneously arises in man as an 

 animal, is the vague but intentional subjectivity of 

 the phenomena presented to his senses. This sub- 

 jectivity is sometimes quiescent and implicit, and 



