While the mythical intelligence continues as before to give its habitual mythical interpretation of many natural phenomena, the use is gradually acquired of special and generic symbols which express special and specific ideas, and these no longer include a personification of the individual thing or idea. Without this intrusion of rational ideas any progress would be impossible, as well as the power of expressing all which time and education present to the mind, and gradually enable it to comprehend; the fanciful image is fused in a rational conception, which is, however, not yet definite and explicit.

What are commonly termed abstract ideas arise from this necessity, as the result of the perfection and development of speech, but these were not at first abstract, although they made use of the abstract idea. Unconscious abstraction is certainly one of the primary acts of the intelligence, since abstraction follows from the consideration of a part or of some parts of a whole, which are themselves presented as a whole to the perception. But this primitive abstraction was so far a concrete fact for the perception, in that each act of the apprehension constituted a phenomenon of which the apparent character was abstracted from the other parts which formed a whole, and was transformed into a living subject, as we have already shown at length. The really explicit abstraction, to which man only attained after many ages, consisting in the simple representation of a quality or part of a thing, could not at that time be effected, although special and specific ideas gradually found their way into thought and speech. All the terms for form and relation in primitive speech, and also among modern savages, confirm this assertion, as linguists are aware; the form and relation now expressing an abstract reference to actions and passions in the verbs, nouns, and adverbs, originally referred to a concrete object.

Three modes or degrees of abstract representations occur in the progressive exercise of the intellectual faculty; these, combined with the special apprehensions of the individual memory, and with imaginative types, constitute the life of human thought, and are the conditions by which we attain to rational knowledge. While the specific mythical type may take the place of the general type in the logical exercise of thought, and may suffice for an imaginative comprehension of the system of the world, the abstract conception intervenes in the daily necessity for communication between these general mythical types, and serves to cement them together, thus rendering the commerce of ideas among men and in the human mind more easy.

The abstract conceptions which are formed in this way may be divided into three classes—physical, moral, and intellectual. To begin with the first; it is impossible for human speech to point out and define a subject or phenomenon in the series to which it belongs by resemblance, identity, or analogy, unless there is already in the mind a conception which includes the general qualities, or quality proper to the series of similar phenomena; this is essentially an abstract type, but it primarily assumes a concrete form. I cannot say that anything is white or heavy, until by repetitions of the same sensation I have been able to combine in a single conception the sensations diffused over an infinite number of objects. The genesis of these conceptions is found in the comparative explicit judgment which depends on the memory for the necessary conditions of its formation.

The typical and abstract idea of white has not merely a nominal value, as it is asserted in some schools of thought, for an empty term could express no idea, whereas this idea is perfectly clear. Neither is it a real thing, but rather an ideal reality, not a pure abstraction of the spirit, extracted, so to speak, from the material substance. The conception of whiteness formed by the comparative judgment is limited by the perception of the concrete, external fact perceived as one special quality among all other qualities in nature, and it is therefore a physiological fact of inward consciousness.

In the abstract idea of white or whiteness we do not only picture to ourselves a quality common to many things, but by this term, and by the idea which corresponds to it, the same sensation is actually present to our inward intuition, or the same quality of the sensation which was previously generated by our external senses in a concrete form. Although, therefore, the idea is generic, the sensation itself is represented to the mind in the form of a concrete perception. It is not concrete in the sense of belonging to a special object or definite form, as it is presented to the outward perception, but only so far as there is actually an inward and physiological sensation of whiteness, which the word recalls to the memory. There can be no mental confusion with the quality of red, or of any colour, when I speak or think of what is white.

When I speak or think of any object as white, I and others perfectly understand what is meant, and a representation of this quality is instantly formed in our minds, in the generic type which was gradually constituted by primitive man by the combination of numerous special sensations, obvious to the sight, and subsequently expressed in speech.

In order that the word which corresponds to the quality may have a given sense, it is necessary to perceive the form of the concrete sensation which gave rise to it; for although the representation is indefinite or generic, that is, not obvious to the external senses, yet it is not physiologically distinct from the sensation of the quality described; the perception of that quality is present by the aid of memory to the inner consciousness.

It is therefore evident that the physiological elements of consciousness are actually contained in so-called abstract ideas, although it is sometimes asserted that they are purely spiritual and intellectual acts, remote from every physiological process of fact and sense. An actual physiological fact (colour in this instance) corresponds to the idea in the nervous centres, and reproduces the sensation due to the perception of special objects, whose physical quality of whiteness we have perceived, and this sensation makes part of the abstract, or rather indefinite conception.

In fact, all which is not actually present to the mind—and the present is an infinitesimal fraction of knowledge—is reproduced by the memory, and this is effected by the molecular movements of the human brain, and by what may be called the ethereal modifications which took place when the sensations, perceptions, and acts first occurred. If the cells vibrate, and the organs of the brain are affected by the recollection of past ideas and acts, just as when they actually occurred (and this appears from Schiff's experiences as to the increase of the brain in heat and volume during dreams), this vibration will be still more marked when any quality which affects our senses is reproduced in the mind.

The particular form of the quality as it appears in a definite object is certainly wanting in the abstract conception; it remains in the first stage of pure sensation, like a spontaneous act of observation, and it is transformed into apprehension by the mental faculty. But the inward consciousness of the quality is actual, psychical, and physical. The abstract conception is a psychical symbol composed of idea and consciousness, or rather of act and consciousness; both are fused into a logical conception of indefinite form, yet consisting of real elements, that is, of cerebral motions and of sensations.

Estimated according to its genuine value, therefore, an abstract conception may be divided into three classes—physical, moral, and intellectual. Whiteness and colours in general, levity and weight, hardness, sound, and the like qualities, are all abstract types which belong to the physical class. Goodness, virtue, love, hatred, and anger must be assigned to the moral class; and equality, identity, number, and quantity, etc., to the intellectual class. Such abstract conceptions, without which human speech would be impossible, did not in the case of primitive man take the explicit and reflex form in which they are presented by mature science, and it is expedient to inquire what character they really assumed in the spontaneous exercise of thought and speech.

There is certainly a difference between the mythical and specific types and the intrinsic value of these abstract conceptions. The former served for the causative interpretation of the living system of the world, and had a superstitious influence on the moral and social progress of mankind; the latter were merely the instrument of thought and speech, and were in spontaneous and daily use. But in spite of this difference, there was no radical and substantial diversity in the genesis of such conceptions, and the fundamental elements of perception were common to both. While the form varied, the primitive law and genesis remained the same.

We have shown that the perception of the phenomenon, as it affects the inner and external consciousness, necessarily involves the form of the subject, and the causative power which animates that form, and this becomes the intellectual source of special and specific myths. These myths, whether they are derived from physical or moral phenomena, are subsequently so completely impersonated as to be resolved into a perfectly human form. In the case of the abstract conceptions necessary in speech, such anthropomorphism does not generally occur; yet we see that sensation and a physiological genesis are inseparable from an abstract conception. Without such sensation of the phenomenon these conceptions would be unintelligible to the percipient himself and to others. In direct sensation, the phenomenon is external, and when it is reproduced in the mind the same cerebral motions to which that sensation was due are repeated.

It is an absolute law, not only of the human mind but of animal intelligence, that the phenomenon should generate the implicit idea of a thing and cause, and the necessity of this psychical law is also apparent in the abstract conception of some given quality. If the effect is not identical, it is at any rate analogous. 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 phenomena, 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 implicit 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 distance, 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 as something which existed independently of the bodies in which its properties were manifested.

This estimate of gravity, as an abstract quality or property, might be repeated of all other physical properties, as well as of those abstract conceptions which are moral and intellectual. Goodness came to be considered as a type, varying indeed in different peoples, according to their race, and their local, moral, and civil conditions, but as a type which corresponded to the mutual relations of men, and to their superstitions and religious beliefs as to the nature of things.

In this case also the abstract conception of the good, the fitting, the useful, which constantly recur in popular speech are regarded, not as mythical powers personified in a human form, but as having a real existence in nature, as something extrinsic to the person or thing in which they are manifested, and as acting upon them as a living and causative power. The same may be said of all other abstract conceptions. Hence, in addition to the formation of cosmic, moral, and intellectual myths, fashioned after the pattern of humanity, logical conceptions arose in the mind, necessary for the exercise of human speech and for a man's converse with himself, and these were regarded as having a real existence, manifested in things and persons and in the system of nature. These entities have their origin in the same faculty as the others; in every conception presented to the mind and reproducing the primitive sensation or emotion, the external or internal phenomenon implicitly generates the subject, and with this the cause. These abstract conceptions did not and do not result in the anthropomorphism of phenomena or ideas, but are transformed into entities which have a real existence.

We must also observe the mobility and interchangeableness of these fetishes, myths, and imaginary entities in the primitive times of the human race, and even in later ages; at one time the fetish acts as a myth, at another the myth has a logical existence. Of this there are many proofs in the traditions of ancient peoples, in the intellectual life of modern savages, and in that of the civilized nations to which we ourselves belong. The historic development does not always follow the regular course we have just described, although these are, in a strictly logical sense, the necessary stages of intellectual evolution. Historically they are often jostled and confounded together by the lively susceptibility and alacrity of the imagination of primitive man, and it is precisely this characteristic which makes these marvellous ages so fertile in fanciful creations, and also in scientific intuitions.

Any one who is sufficiently acquainted with the ancient literature of civilized peoples, and with the legends of those which are rude and savage; any one who has reflected on the spontaneous value of words and conceptions in modern speech, must often have observed how myth assumed the form of a logical conception as time went on; and conversely how the logical entity assumed the form of a myth, and how interchangeable they are. It is well known that the myths have been so far adapted to the necessities of speech as to be transmuted into verbs; libare from liber, which perhaps came in its turn from liba, a propitiatory cake, while Libra was the genius who in mythological ages presided over fruitfulness and plenty. So again juvare, from the root jov, after it had already been used for the anthropomorphic Jove. We find in Plautus the verb summanare, from the god Summanus, the nocturnal sky. Not only verbs but adjectives were derived in common speech from the mythical names of gods; from Genius, a multiform and universal power in ancient Latin mythology, we have genialis and hence the expressions genialis lectus, genialis homo, genialis hiems, and poets and philosophers apply the same epithet even to the elements and the stars. On the other hand, Virtue, Faith, Piety, and other like moral conceptions, first regarded as real, yet impersonal entities, were transformed into a perfect myth, and into human forms worthy of divine worship.

Even in our own time, and not only among the uneducated people but among men of high culture—when they do not pause to consider the real value of words in the familiarity of daily conversation—any one who seeks for the direct meaning of the terms he uses will admit the truth of what I say. We constantly ascribe a real existence to abstract conceptions and qualities, treating them as subjects which have a substantial being, and which act for the most part with deliberate purpose, although they are not transformed as in the case of myths into human shapes.

In abstract, intellectual conceptions, such as those of equality, distance, number, and the like, the same faculty and the same elements are at work as in those which express physical and moral qualities. These conceptions, which as civilization advances ultimately become mere intellectual symbols necessary for logical speech, are at first formed by the actual comparison of things, and therefore by the aid of the senses. Even if we were to assert with some schools of thought that they were formed a priori in the mind, sensation would still be necessary as the occasion of displaying them. When such conceptions are expressed in words there is a physiological recurrence to the mind of what may be termed the shadow of previous sensations or perceptions, which are united in an intellectual type to give rise to such conceptions. And in the appearance of this phenomenal basis, thought unconsciously fulfils the fundamental law of assuming, or I might say of actually feeling, the reality of the subject.

It must be remembered that in speaking of these entities created by the intellect, I refer to the primitive ages of human thought, or to the notions of ignorant people, and also to the spontaneous language of educated men, who in ordinary conversation do not 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 perfectly 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 phenomenon, 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 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 naturally arise from the mental combination of images, emotions, and ideas into a whole, and these impersonations 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 anthropomorphic 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 substantial 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 impossible 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.[27] The mythical human form does not indeed appear in these conceptions, but a substantial entity is involved in them which sometimes, as we have seen, may even assume the aspect of a complete myth.

A careful analysis of the process of our intelligence has shown that this habitual personification of the phenomenon or abstract conception is due to the innate faculty of perception, since the appearance of any phenomenon necessarily produces the idea of a subject actuated by deliberate purpose; this law is equally constant in the case of animals, in whom, however, it does not issue in a rational conception. The objection of ourselves into nature, the personification of its phenomena and myths in general, are common to all, while they take a more fanciful form in the case of primitive man; they are the constant and necessary result of the perception of external and internal phenomena. This personification includes moral and intellectual as well as physical phenomena, and it always proceeds in the same way, from special phenomena to specific types, and hence to abstract perceptions.

In this way we have established the important fact that the primitive personification of every external or internal phenomenon, the origin of all myths, religions, and superstitions, is accomplished by the same necessary psychical and physical law as that which produces sensation. That is, men, as well as animals, begin by thinking and feeling in a mythical way, owing to the intrinsic constitution of their intellectual life; and while animals never emerge from these psychical conditions, men are gradually emancipated from them, as they become able to think more rationally, thus finding redemption, truth, and liberty by means of science.

We now propose to unite in a single conception this necessity of our intellect, at once the product and the cause of perception, and of the spontaneous vivification of phenomena; since the law may be expressed in a compendious form.

Both in physical, moral, and intellectual myths, and in the substantial entity infused into abstract conceptions, the external or internal phenomenon immediately generates the idea of a subject, since it is a fundamental law of our mind to entify (entificare) every object of our perception, emotion, or consciousness. If any one should object to this neologism, in spite of its adequate expression of the original function of the intelligence, we reply that the use and necessity of the verb identify have been accepted in the neo-Latin tongues, and therefore entify, which has the same root and form, can hardly be rejected, since it, like the 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 entifying the object of sensation, or, in a word, all phenomena. Such entification is the result of spontaneous 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 causas."



CHAPTER VII.

THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF MYTH AND SCIENCE.

In the foregoing pages we have reached the primordial fact of our psychical and physical nature, in which, as it appears to us, both myth and science have their origin. After first considering the animal kingdom as a whole, we have seen that the interaction between external phenomena and the consciousness of an organism results in the spontaneous vivification of the phenomenon in question, so that the origin of the mythical representation of nature is found in the innate faculty of animal perception.

Nor could it be otherwise. The internal activity and intrinsic sense of conscious and deliberate life which inspires animals and men, while the latter are still ignorant of the rational order of things, is necessarily reflected both in the external objects of perception and in the internal emotions, as if they were operating causes independent of the will of the percipient. It is impossible for an animal, which is unable by voluntary observation to make, any analytic distinction between the subject and the object, and their respective effects, to consider such phenomena as mechanical entities, subject to necessary and eternal laws. The animal therefore accepts the idea suggested by his spontaneous and subjective nature, that these phenomena are alive. Grass, fruits, plants, water, the movement of material bodies, ordinary and extraordinary meteors, all are implicitly apprehended by him as subjects endowed with will and purpose after the manner of mankind. Nor can the living subjectivity of the phenomenon ever be gauged by the animal in whom the deliberate power of reflection is wanting. His life is consequently passed in a world of living subjects, not of phenomena and laws which mechanically act together; it is, so to speak, a permanent metaphor.

Man himself, so far as his animal nature is concerned, acts in the same way, and although he subsequently attains to the exercise of reasoning powers in virtue of the psychical reduplication of himself, the primitive faculty persists, and hence comes the mythical creation of a peculiar world of conceptions which give rise to all superstitions, mythologies, and religions. This is also the process of science itself, as far as the classifying method and intrinsic logical form are concerned. The historical source of the two great streams of the intellect, the mythical and the scientific, is found in the primitive act of entifying the phenomenon presented to the senses.

We must briefly describe the evolution of these two mythical and scientific faculties of the mind; we must investigate the mode and cause of their divergence from a common source, through what transformations they pass, in order to see in what way the one is gradually dried up, while the other increases in volume and force. The reader must forgive us if we use some repetition in developing a subject on which we have already touched, since without such repetition the present historical explanation would be obscure.

The first stage of knowledge consists in the observation of the things which surround us, and this first stage, which is necessary also in science, is the common property of animals. Their observation of themselves and of external things is psychologically and physiologically the same as that of man, and in both cases there is a subjective animation of the phenomena themselves. The primitive source of science in its observation of phenomena was the same as that of myth and of the special fetish; without such observation it would have had no existence.

In immediate succession to this primitive fact, which is common to the whole animal kingdom, there arose—if we consider the general process without the limitations of circumstances, places, time, and a thousand accidents—two kinds of faculties which were identical in form, although they had different effects, and produced opposite results. For in the case of mythical entification the tendency to impersonation was always increasing and becoming more distinctly zoomorphic and anthropomorphic, and in this form it was crystallized or mummified, while science on the other hand was always enlarging its sphere and dissipating the first mythical form of its conception, until nothing was left but a purely rational idea.

When this evolution takes place in peoples and races which are incapable of improvement, or have a limited capacity for advanced civilization, the faculty of myth remains in the ascendant; and as past and present history shows, mythical stagnation and intellectual barrenness may follow, until intellectual development is arrested and even destroyed. If on the other hand the evolution takes place in peoples and races capable of indefinite civilization, myth gradually disappears and science shines forth victoriously.

Even in historical and civilized races the two cycles go on together, since while robust intellects throw off as they advance the mythical shell in which they were first inclosed, the ignorant masses continue their devotions to fetishes and myths, which they can infuse even into the grandest religious teaching. They perhaps might also perish, crystallized in their miserable superstitions, unless, in virtue of the race to which they belong, the nobler minds were gradually to succeed in illuminating and raising them into a purer atmosphere. In our Aryan race, and in our own country we have all seen the ideas of Christianity transformed into the earlier fetishes and pagan myths; the saints are merely substituted for the gods and demi-gods, for the deities of groves, of the sea and of war, as they are found in ancient mythology. The legends of the saints and of Christ himself are grafted on similar legends of the ancient religions of Greece and Rome, and Paradise has assumed the appearance and form of Olympus. The paintings still extant in the catacombs of Rome, which mark the transformation of the old into the new religion, speak plainly enough by their symbols and figures.

Myth is logically identical with the scientific process in its intrinsic character; starting from a vague subjectivity which gradually assumes a human shape, the first intellectual vitality is lost, unless it is revived by a higher impulse. Science, on the other hand, which begins in myth, gradually divests this subjectivity of its anthropomorphic character, until pure reason is attained, and with this the power of indefinite progress.

The theory which has hitherto been generally accepted by mythologists, even by those who profess Comte's great principle of historical evolution, is that man began with special fetishes, that these were combined in comprehensive types to form polytheistic hierarchies, and hence he rose by an analogous process to a more or less vague conception of monotheism.

This theory, true as to the principal forms which myth successively assumes, is not accurate with respect to the stages of development, and it is also erroneous in some particulars of the actual history of the various mythologies of different peoples.

In the early chapters of this work we have briefly touched on such a development, and the reader must pardon us for returning to the subject, now that we have to give an historical account of the process of evolution. In fact, the fetish, in the general sense of the term, is not the first form of myth which is revealed in the dawn of human life. In order to estimate its positive value, it is necessary to analyze such a conception with greater accuracy, and then to verify it historically with the help of the science of ethnology.

The first manifestations of mythical ideas must be considered in man as an animal; that is, as the result of his spontaneous intercourse with the world, independently of the psychical faculty peculiar to himself, after he had acquired by subsequent evolution of mind and body the faculty and habit of reflection. This first stage does not involve any definite fetish, that is, an immediate belief in a special object which exerts its influence on the human soul, even when it is remote and unseen: such a fetish is a secondary stage in human development. The first mythical representations of animals, and of man, so far as his animal nature is concerned, are not confined to fixed objects, which can be retained in the mind as operative under all circumstances; they are indefinite, and diffused through all the phenomena which are successively perceived and vivified. The unseen wind which rises and falls, the moving cloud, the flash of lightning and roar of thunder, the dawn, the rushing torrent—when any of these things are perceived by animals and primitive men, they are endowed with subjective life and are supposed to act with deliberate purpose; and this is the first form of myth. But when they are not present (I here speak of the animal nature of man) they do not remain in the mind as persistent beings to which the tribute of worship inspired by hope or fear must be paid; these and other phenomena only inspire such sentiments when they are actually present.

It is no vain distinction which I mate between the first vague and intermittent form of myth suggested by phenomena actually present, and that of the first stage of fetish: this distinction marks the difference between the mythical representation of animals and the classifying and reflective process peculiar to man.

Comte was the first to remark, quite incidentally, that animals might sometimes attain to the idea of a fetish; Darwin gave the instance of a dog which was scared by the movement of an open umbrella in a meadow, although he remained quiet when it was unshaken by the wind; and Herbert Spencer, partly 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 movement 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 unusual 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 subjectivity is sometimes quiescent and implicit, and sometimes active, in which case it may arouse the fear of evil, or the hope of physical pleasures.

As in man the reflex power slowly and gradually grows—although at first in an exclusively empirical form—so he slowly and gradually accepts the first form of fetishism, which consists in the permanent and fixed individuation of a phenomenon or object of nature, as a power which he reflectively believes to be the artificer of good or evil.

In this stage it is no longer the phenomenon actually present which arouses the apprehension of an intentional subjectivity, while its image and efficacy disappear with the sensible object; the phenomenon, or the inanimate or animate form, is reflectively retained by the memory, in which it appears as a malignant or benignant power. In a word, the first stage of fetishism, which is the second form of the evolution of myth, is the universal and primitive sense of myth in nature, which man alone is capable of applying permanently to some given phenomenon, such as wind, rain, and the like, or lakes, volcanoes, and rocks, and these remain fixed in the mind as powers of good or evil. In the earlier stage of myth the scene is constantly changing, while in the latter, certain objects or phenomena remain fixed in the memory, exciting the same emotions whether they are present or absent, and to this consciousness we may trace the dawn of worship.

Ethnography affords plain proofs of the fetishism which preceded the civilization of many peoples, and among those which still remain in the stage of fetishism we can trace the primitive form of a vague impersonation of natural objects and phenomena.[28]

As we have already seen, every animal and unfamiliar object is in this first stage of fetishism regarded as the external covering of a spiritual power which has assumed what is believed to be the primordial form of the fetish; this fetish takes the place of the natural phenomenon, and is believed to be capable of exercising a direct subjectivity which is vague but perfectly real.

We pass from this first form of fetish to the second, namely to the veneration of objects, animals, plants, and the like, in which an extrinsic power is supposed to be incarnated. Many ages elapsed before man attained to this second stage of fetishism, since it was necessarily preceded by a further and reflex elaboration of myth, namely, the genesis of a belief in spirits.

Herbert Spencer and Tylor are among the writers who have given a masterly description of this phase of the human intellect, and history and ethnography have confirmed the accuracy of their researches and conclusions. The shadow cast by a man's own body, the reflection of images in the water, natural echoes, the reappearance of images of the departed in dreams, the general instinct which leads man to vivify all he sees, produced what may be called the reduplication of man in himself, and the savage's primitive theory of the human soul. Originally this soul was multiplied into all these natural phenomena, but it was afterwards distributed by the mythical faculty into three, four, five, or more powers, personifying the spirits. This belief in a multiplicity of souls in man is not only still extant among more or less rude peoples of the present day in Asia, Europe, Africa, America, and Polynesia, but it is also the foundation of the belief of more civilized nations on the subject, including our own Aryan race. Birch and others observe that the Egyptians ascribed four spirits to man—Ba, Akba, Ka, and Khaba. The Romans give three:

"Bis duo sunt homines, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra."

The same belief is found among nearly all savages. The Fijians distinguish between the spirit which is buried with the dead man and that more ethereal spirit which is reflected in the water and lingers near the place where he died. The Malagasy believe in three souls, the Algonquin in two, the Dakotan in three, the native of Orissa in four.

Since a fetish, strictly so called, is the incarnation of a power in some given object, it must be preceded by this rude belief in spirits and shades. Such a complex elaboration takes time, since it involves a previous creation of powers, spirits or the shades of men; these lead to the belief in independent spirits of various origin, which people the heavens and all parts of the world. Hence arose the belief in transmigration, the necessary prelude to the theory of the incarnation, which was ultimately constituted by fetishism. The comparative study of languages shows that including the Aryan and Semitic races, the belief in spirits was developed in all peoples, and in all of them we also find a belief in the transmigration of souls.

The transmigration of the human soul was first believed to take place in the body of a new-born child, since at the moment of death the soul of the dying person entered into the foetus. The Algonquins buried the corpses of their children by the wayside, so that their souls might easily enter into the bodies of the pregnant women who passed that way. Some of the North American tribes believed that the mother saw in a dream the dead relation who was to imprint his likeness on her unborn child. At Calabar, when the mother who has lost a child gives birth to another, she believes that the dead child is restored to her. The natives of New Guinea believe that a son who greatly resembles his dead father has inherited his soul. Among the Yorubas the new-born child is greeted with the words: "Thou hast returned at last!" The same ideas prevail among the Lapps and Tartars, as well as among the negroes of the West Coast of Africa. Among the aborigines of Australia the belief is widely diffused that those who die as black return as white men.

Primitive and ignorant peoples perceive no precise distinction between man and brutes, so that, as Tylor observes, they readily accept the belief of the transmigration of the human soul into an animal, and then into inanimate objects, and this belief culminates in the incarnation of the true fetish. Among some of the North American tribes the spirits of the dead are supposed to pass into bears. An Eskimo widow refused to eat seal's flesh because she supposed that her husband's soul had migrated into that animal. Others have imagined that the souls of the dead passed into birds, beetles, and other insects, according to their social rank when still alive. Some African tribes believe that the dead migrate into certain species of apes.

By pursuing this theory, as we shall presently show more fully, the transition was easy to the incarnation of a spirit, whether that of a man or of some other being, into any object whatever, which was thereby invested with beneficent or malignant power. It is easy to show that in this second stage of fetishism, which some have believed to be the primitive form of myth, there would be no further progress in the mythical elaboration of spirits, their mode of life, their influence and possible transmigrations. This elaboration is indeed a product of the mythical faculty, but in a rational order; it is a logical process, mythical in substance, but purely reflective in form. For which reason it was impossible for animals to attain to this stage.

Some peoples remained in this phase of belief, while others advanced to the ulterior and polytheistic form. This may also be divided into two classes; those who classify and ultimately reduce fetishes into a more general conception, and those whose conception takes an anthropomorphic form. Let us examine the genesis of both classes.

When the popular belief in spirits had free development, the number of spirits and powers was countless, as many examples show. To give a single instance—the Australians hold that there is an innumerable multitude of spirits; the heavens, the earth, every nook, grove, bush, spring, crag, and stone are peopled with them. In the same way, some American tribes suppose the visible and invisible world to be filled with good and evil spirits; so do the Khonds, the Negroes of New Guinea, and, as Castren tells us, the Turanian tribes of Asia and Europe. Consequently, fetishes, which are the incarnation of these spirits in some object, animate or inanimate, natural or artificial, are innumerable, since primitive man and modern savages have created such fetishes, either at their own pleasure or with the aid of their priests, magicians, and sorcerers.

Man's co-ordinating faculty, in those races which are capable of progressive evolution, does not stop short at this inorganic disintegration of things; he begins a process of classification and, at the same time, of reduction, by which the numerous fetishes are, by their natural points of likeness and unlikeness in character and form, reduced to types and classes, which, as we have already shown, comprise in themselves the qualities of all the particular objects of the same species which are diffused throughout nature.

By this spontaneous process of human thought, due to the innate power of reasoning, man has gradually reduced the chaos of special fetishes to a tolerably systematic order, and he then goes on to more precise simplification. Let us try to trace in this historic fact the classifying process at the moment when the first form of polytheism succeeds to irregular and anarchical fetishism.

In the Samoan islands, a local god is wont to appear in the form of an owl, and the accidental discovery of a dead owl would be deplored, and its body would be buried with solemn rites. The death of this particular bird does not, however, imply the death of the god himself, since the people believe him to be incarnated in the whole species. In this fact we see that a special fetish is developed into a specific form; thus a permanent type is evolved from special appearances.

Acosta has handed down to us another belief of the comparatively civilized Peruvians, which recalls the primitive genesis of their mythical ideas. He says that the shepherds used to adore various stars, to which they assigned the names of animals; stars which protected men against the respective animals after whom they were called. They held the general belief that all animals whatever had a representative in heaven, which watched over their reproduction, and of which they were, so to speak, the essence. This affords another example of the more general extension and classification, and, at the same time, of the reduction of the original multitude of fetishes.

Some of the North American Indians asserted that every species of animal had an elder brother, who was the origin of all the individuals of the species. They said, for example, that the beaver, which was the elder brother of this species of rodents, was as large as one of their cabins. Others supposed that all kinds of animals had their type in the world of souls, a manitu, which kept guard over them. Ralston, in his "Songs of the Russian People," tells us that Buyan, the island paradise of Russian mythology, contains a serpent older than all others, a larger raven, a finer queen bee, and so of all other animals. Morgan, in his work upon the Iroquois, observes that they believe in a spirit or god of every species of trees and plants.

From these beliefs and facts, drawn from different peoples and different parts of the world, we can understand how a vague and inorganic fetishism gradually became classified into types which constitute the first phase of polytheism. The logical effort which transformed the manifold beliefs into types goes on, but from their vague and indefinite nature, not only the power, but also the extrinsic form of man is easily infused into them, so that they are invested with human faculties and sensations, and also with the anthropomorphic form and countenance of which we have spoken elsewhere. In fact, when the special fetishes which are naturally alike are united in a single type, the object, animal, or phenomenon which corresponds to it in this early stage of polytheism is no longer perceived, but a numen is evolved from this type, which has not only human power, but a human form; and hence follow the specific idols of serpents, birds, and all natural phenomena, in which the primitive fetish has been incarnated.[29]

In this second stage of polytheism, anthropomorphism appears in an external form, and the specific type is transformed into the idol which represents and dominates over it, inspiring the commission of beneficent or hurtful acts. Of this it is unnecessary to adduce examples, since all the mythologies which have reached this polytheistic stage are anthropomorphic, and in these the specific type, which serves as the first step to polytheism, subsequently becomes a completely human idol.

After this anthropomorphic classification has been reached by logical elaboration, a new field is opened for the reduction of special types into those which are more general, as had been previously the case in the early stages of myth. By continually concentrating, and at the same time by enlarging the value of the conception, it is united in a single form which constitutes the dawn and genesis of monotheism. This methodical process, which is characteristic of human thought, may be traced in all peoples which have really attained to the monotheistic idea, in the Aryan and Semitic races, in China, Japan, and Egypt, in Peru and Mexico; the belief may also be obscurely traced in an inchoate form among savage and inferior tribes, as, for example, among the Indians of Central and North America, and among some of the inhabitants of Africa and barbarous Asia.

While this conception took a more or less definite form among the more advanced peoples, the earlier and debased myths maintained their ground, and still continue to do so. Of this we have examples in Europe itself, and among its more civilized peoples which have been transplanted elsewhere; for while in one direction a capacity for classification leads to a purer monotheistic conception, and even to rational science, the great majority of the common people, and even of those of higher culture, still hold many ideas which are polytheistic and anthropomorphic, and some which really belong to the debased stage of fetishism and vulgar superstition.

Other causes contribute to produce the natural and intrinsic concurrence of the several stages of myth which are found existing together in the life of a people. Such, for example, is the conquest effected by a more civilized nation over another race, inferior by nature or retarded by other circumstances. The mythical ideas of the conquered people remain, and are even diffused through the lower classes of the conquering race; or they are ingrafted by a synthetic and assimilating process, so as to modify other mythical and religious beliefs. This compound of various stages and various beliefs also occurs through the moral and intellectual diffusion of dogma, without the acquisition of really new matter. Manifest proofs of these various stages of myth, co-existent together, may be traced in the development of the Vedic ideas among the earlier aboriginal nations, and conversely; as in the case of the Aztecs and Incas in Mexico and Peru, whose earlier beliefs were mixed with those of their conquerors. The same thing may be observed in the development of Judaism during the Babylonish captivity, in the biblical and messianic doctrines which were grafted on pagan beliefs, and in the teaching of Islam, as it was adopted in the East and among the black races of Africa.

We must make allowance for these extrinsic accidents if we are to describe correctly the natural course and logical evolution of myth. Even with respect to the special evolution of myth in a separate people, unmixed with others, while it is normal in what may be termed its general form and categorical phases, yet like all natural objects and phenomena, and much more in all which concerns the human mind, there are variations in its forms, and it attains its ends by many ways.

If we take a wider view of the general and reciprocal influences of ethnic myths; as respects the historic results of mythologies, we shall see that if every race evolved its sphere of myth in accordance with the canons laid down by us, their effect upon each other would work together for a common result more quickly than when each is taken apart. The reader must allow me to make my meaning clear by the following passage from my work on the "Dottrina razionale del Progresso," which I published in 1863, in the "Politecnico," Milan, on the fusion of the monotheistic conception of the Semitic race with the beliefs of Greece and Rome at the dawn of Christianity:—

"Christianity was originally based on the absolute idea of the divine first Principle, to which one portion of the Semitic race had attained by intellectual evolution, and by the acumen of the great men who brought this idea to perfection. Either because of their clearer consciousness, or from their environment and the physical circumstances of the race, the Semitic people passed from the primitive ideas of mythology to the conception of the absolute and infinite Being, while other races still adhered to altogether fanciful and anthropomorphic ideas of this Being. Our race had an Olympus, like the others, and throughout its history this Olympus was always assuming new forms, although a human conception was the basis of its religious ideas. The Chinese and Semitic races were the first to rise to the conception of an absolute first principle, but in both cases the conception was more or less unfruitful.

"The gradual transition from consciousness to conception, from the fact to the idea, from the idol to the law, from the symbol to the thought, from the finite to the infinite, is the characteristic and essential course taken by the human mind. But, practically, this process is more gradual or more rapid, is retarded or advanced, attains its aim or stops short in its first rudiments, according to the race in which it occurs. So it was that, as we have just said, the Chinese and Semitic races were the first to reach the final goal of this psychological progress; other peoples, such as the Aryans and their offshoots, savages and partially civilized races, remained in the early stages of this dialectic scale. Undoubtedly, in our own race, the early religious conceptions which constituted a simple worship of nature in various forms were constantly becoming of purer character, and they were not only exalted in their spiritual quality, but in the Greek and Roman religions they attained to something like scientific precision. Yet even in these higher aspirations the race did not surrender its mythical faculty, to which it was impelled by its physical and psychological constitution, and the pure conception was unconsciously overshadowed by symbolic ideas. We can plainly see how far this symbolism, peculiar to the race, obscured the minds of Plato and Aristotle, and of almost all the subsequent philosophers. In the Semitic and Chinese races this inner symbolism of the mind, with reference to the interpretation of nature, was less tenacious, intense, and productive, and they soon freed themselves from their mental bonds in order to rise to the conception of the absolute Being, distinct from the world. When this idea had been grasped by rude and popular intuition, men of the highest intellectual power perfected the still confused conception, and founded upon it science, civil and political institutions, and national customs.

"The idea of Christianity arose in the midst of the Semitic people through him whose name it bears, and who perfected the religious idea of his nation. This idea, in its Semitic simplicity, consisted in a belief in the existence of one, eternal, infinite God, the immediate creator of all things; it included the tradition of man's loss of his original felicity, and the promise of a restoration of all peoples, and of the Israelites in particular, to their former condition of earthly happiness. Christ appeared, and while he upheld the Mosaic law and its original idea, he declared himself to be the promised deliverer, sent of God; the Son of God, which among the Semitic people was the term applied to their prophets. His moral teaching gave a more perfect form to the old law, and by his example he afforded a model of human virtue worthy of all veneration; the germs of a marvellous civilization were to be found in his moral and partially new teaching. The same doctrine had been, to some extent, inculcated by the Jewish teachers, and the schools of Hillel and Gamaliel were certainly not morally inferior to his own, as we learn from the tradition of the Talmud, and from some passages in the Acts of the Apostles. The origin, development, and teaching of primitive Christianity were therefore essentially Semitic, since it had its origin in a people of that race, and in a man of that people. Yet the Semitic race did not become Christian; and, after so many ages have elapsed, it still rejects Christianity. It was the Aryan race, to which we Europeans belong, which adopted this teaching and became essentially Christian, although this race is psychologically the most idolatrous of the world, as far as the aesthetic idol—not the common fetish—is concerned. Let us inquire into the cause of this remarkable fact.

"As soon as the teaching of Christ was adopted by those familiar with Aryan civilization and opinions, an idea repugnant to Semitic conceptions, and still unintelligible to that race, was evolved from it—I mean the idea that the human Christ, the Son of God, was God himself. The Semite holds that God is so far exalted above all creation, so great and eternal in comparison with the littleness of the world and of man, that God incarnate is not merely a blasphemy but an unmeaning and absurd phrase. Such a dogma was therefore energetically repudiated, and the Semitic race submitted to persecution and dispersal rather than accept it. This is the real reason why Christianity has not been received and will never be received by the Semitic race. When Mahomet reorganized and perfected the Arab creed, he preserved intact the Semitic principle of the absolute and incommunicable nature of God: the Semitic religion has ever held that there is one God, and his prophet.

"On the other hand, Christianity was rapidly diffused among the Greek and Latin peoples, and in all parts of Europe inhabited by our race: even savages and barbarians accepted more or less frankly a doctrine rejected by the Semites in whom it had its origin. Many and various causes have been assigned for this rapid diffusion of the new doctrine, and the old Greek and Latin fathers ascribed it to the fact that men's minds had been naturally and providentially prepared for it. It was attributed by others to the miseries and sufferings of the slave population, and of the poor, who found a sweet illusion and comfort in the Christian hope of a world beyond the grave. Some, again, suggest the omnipotent will of a tyrant, or the extreme ignorance of the common and barbarous people. Although all these causes had a partial effect, they were secondary and accidental. The true and unique cause lay deeper, in the intellectual constitution of the race to which Christianity was preached; just as physiological characteristics are reproduced in the species until they become permanent, so do intellectual inclinations become engrained in the nature.

"We have said that our race is aesthetically more mythological than all others. If we consider the religious teaching of various Aryan peoples, from the most primitive Vedic idolatry to the successive religions of Brahma and Zend, of the Celts, Greeks, Latins, Germans, and Slavs, we shall see how widely they differ from the religious conceptions and ideas of other races. The vein of fanciful creations is inexhaustible, and there is a wealth of symbolic combinations and a profusion of celestial and semi-celestial dramas. The intrinsic habit of forming mythical representations of nature is due to a more vivid sense of her power, to a rapid succession of images, and to a constant projection of the observer's own personality into phenomena. This peculiar characteristic of our race is never wholly overcome, and to it is added a proud self-consciousness, an energy of thought and action, a constant aspiration after grand achievements, and a haughty contempt for all other nations.

"The very name of Aryan, transmitted in a modified form to all successive generations, denotes dominion and valour; the Brahmanic cosmogony, and the epithet of apes, given to all other races in the epic of Valmiki, bear witness to the same fact; it is shown in the slavery imposed on conquered peoples, in the hatred of foreigners felt by all the Hellenic tribes; in the omnipotence of Rome, the haughtiness of the Germanic orders; in the feudal system, in the Crusades; and finally, in the modern sense of our superiority to all other existing races. The quickness of perception, and the facile projection of human personality into natural objects, led to the manifold creations of Olympus, and this was an aesthetic obstacle to any nearer approach to the pure and absolute conception of God, while the innate pride of race was a hindrance to our humiliation in the dust before God. The Semites declared that man was created in the image of God, and we created God in our own image; while conscious of the power of the numina we confronted them boldly, and were ready to resist them. The Indian legends, and those of the Hellenes, the Scandinavians, and the whole Aryan race, are full of conflicts between gods and men. The demi-gods must be remembered, showing that the Aryans believed themselves to be sufficiently noble and great for the gods to love them, and to intermarry with them. Thus the Aryan made himself into a God, and often took a glorious place in Olympus, while he declared that God was made man.

"We might imagine that the doctrine of God incarnate would be as repugnant to the ideas, feelings, and intellect of the Aryan as it was to the Semitic race. But the anthropomorphic side of Christianity was readily embraced by the former as a mythical and aesthetic conception, and indeed it was they who made a metaphorical expression into an essential dogma: the pride natural to the Aryan race made them eager to accept a religion which placed man in a still higher Olympus: a belief in Christ was rapidly diffused, not as God but as the Man-God. These are the true reasons, not only for the rapid spread of Christianity in Europe, but also for the philosophic systems of the Platonists and Alexandrines which preceded it. Although Philo was a Hebrew, and probably knew nothing of Christ, he attained by means of Hellenism to the idea of the Man-God; the Platonic Word, which was merely the projection of God into human reason, was accepted for the same reason as the Christian dogma of the Word made man.

"Let us see what new principles, what higher morality and civilization were added by the diffusion of Christianity to those principles which were the spontaneous product of the race. We must first consider what part the pagan gods, as they were regarded by educated men, played in the history of the European race, with respect to the individual and to the commonwealth. The pagan Olympus, considered as a whole, and without reference to the various forms which it assumed in different peoples, was not essentially distinct from human society. Although the gods formed a higher order of immortal beings, they were mixed up with men in a thousand ways in practical life, and conformed to the ways of humanity; they were constantly occupied in doing good or ill to mortals; they were warmly interested in the disputes of men, taking part in the conflicts of persons, cities, and peoples; special divinities watched over men from the cradle to the grave, and they were loved or hated by the gods by reason of their family and race. In short, the heavenly and earthly communities were so intermixed that the gods were only superior and immortal men.

"The people were accustomed to consider their deities as ever present, distinct from, and yet inseparably joined with them; so that the individual, the country, the tribes, were ever governed, guarded, favoured, or opposed by special and peculiar gods. Olympus had a history, since the acts of the gods took place in time and were coincident with the history of nations, so that every event in heaven corresponded with one on earth; the idea of divine justice was exemplified in that of men, and both were perfected together. Among pagans of the Aryan race there was a perpetual and repeated alliance between men and gods made in the image of man. This action of the gods both for good and evil became in its turn the rule of life for the ignorant multitude, and they acted in conformity with the supposed will and actions of the gods; the divine will was, however, nothing but an a priori religious conception of an idol representing the forces of nature or some moral or religious idea. The moral perfection of nations, as time went on, also perfected the supreme justice of Olympus, and the moral worth of the gods increased as men became better. So that it was not the original theological idea, but man himself, who made heaven more perfect, and the gods morally better and more just.

"The explicit power of mental reasoning and of science was added to this spontaneous evolution of the religious idea, so far as the improved morality of the race perfected the heavenly justice which was its own creation. The pagan Olympus was gradually simplified by sages and philosophers; the illicit passions of the gods were set aside, and it was transformed into a providential government of individuals and of society, much more remote from direct contact with men. The conception of the immortal gods included one supreme power, formative, protecting or avenging, and this conception bordered on the Semitic idea of the absolute Being, although without quite attaining to it. God was confounded with the order of things, his laws were those of the universe, by which he was also bound, and the righteous man lived in conformity with these laws. When Christianity began, pagan rationalism had arrived at the idea of a spiritual and directing power, organically identical with the universe. It was neither the Olympus of the common people, nor the Semitic Jehovah, but rather the conscious and inevitable order of nature. Although, either as an Olympus or as a dogma, the deity was confounded with men or constrained them to follow a more rational rule of life, yet paganism clearly distinguished the gods from men in their concrete personality, and the action of humanity was therefore distinct from that of the deity.

"When Christianity began, the peoples of the Aryan race in Europe, or at least those of more advanced civilization, had constituted for themselves a heavenly Pantheon, which contained nearly all the primitive deities, but in a more human form and exercising a juster rule over the world, while at the same time they were regarded as quite distinct from the society of men. Although there was in this multiplicity of divine forms an hierarchical order of different ranks, there was no general conception to include the destinies of the whole human race, and to manifest by its unity its providential and historical development. Each people believed in their own special destiny, which should either raise them to greater glory and power or bring them to a speedy and inevitable end; but there was no common fate, no common prosperity nor disaster. Rome had, as far as possible, united these various peoples by the idea of her power, by the inforcement of her laws, and by the benefits of her citizenship, yet the Roman unity was external, and did not spring from the intimate sense of a common lineage. While the nations were so closely united to Rome by brute force, the subject peoples were agitated by a desire for their ancient independence and self-government. Some of these pagan multitudes advanced in civilization through their education in the learning of the Romans, and in morality through their spontaneous activity, but they did not possess any deep sense of a general providence, and heaven and earth continued to be under the sway of an incomprehensible fate.

"If we now turn to consider the mental conditions of educated men at that time, we shall see that they transformed the Olympus of personal and concrete gods into symbols of the forces of nature, and that they had risen to a purer conception of the deity by making it agree with the progress of reason; but this deity was so remote from earth as to have scarcely anything to do with the government of the world. According to the teaching of the Stoics, which was very generally diffused, man was supposed to be so far left to himself that he was the creator of his own virtue, and had to struggle, not only against nature and his fellow-man, but against fate, the underlying essence of every cosmic form and motion. If this pagan rationalism gave rise to great theoretic morality, and produced amazing examples of private and public virtue, it had little effect on the multitudes, nor did it contain any guiding principle for the historical life of humanity as a whole.

"Christianity proclaimed the spiritual unity of God, the unity of the race, the brotherhood of all peoples, the redemption of the world, and consequently a providential influence on mankind. Christianity taught that God himself was made man, and lived among men. Such teaching was offered to the people as a truth of consciousness rather than of dogma, although it was afterwards preserved in a theological form by the preaching of Paul, and the pagan mind was more affected by sentiment than by reason. The unity of God was associated in their aesthetic imagination with the earlier conception of the supreme Zeus, which now took a more Semitic form, and Olympus was gloriously transformed into a company of elect Christians and holy fathers of the new faith. A confused sentiment as to the mystic union of peoples, who became brothers in Christ, had a powerful effect on the imagination and the heart, since they had already learned to regard the world as the creation of one eternal Being. In the ardour of proselytism and of the diffusion of the new creed, they hailed the historical transformation of the earthly endeavour after temporal acquisitions and pleasures into a providential preparation for the heavenly kingdom.

"In Christ, the incarnation of the supreme God, they beheld the apotheosis of man, so acceptable to the Aryan race, since he thus became the absolute ruler of the world and its fates. Ideas and sentiments, of which the Semitic mind was incapable, and which were opposed to their historical and intellectual development, moved and satisfied the Aryan mind, and became associated as far as possible with the dogma and belief to which the race had attained in their pagan civilization. Thus heaven, dogma, and Christian rites assumed from the first a pagan form; and while the original idols were repudiated in the zeal for new principles, their common likeness was maintained by the imaginative power of the race.

"In this way Christianity became popular, and the Semitic idea was invested with pagan forms, in order to carry on the gradual and more intimate spiritual transformation which is not yet terminated. Its teaching was at first decidedly rejected and opposed by cultivated minds, accustomed as the Greeks were with few exceptions to use their reason. Among philosophers, the popular belief in a personal Olympus had disappeared, and a more rational study of mankind did not allow them to understand or comprehend a dogma which re-established anthropomorphism under another aspect, so that this new and impious superstition became the object of persecution. These were, however, mere exceptions, an anticipation of the opposition of reason to mythical ideas, which became more vigorous in every successive age, until the time arrived when reason, educated by a long course of exercise, was able to renew the effort with greater authority and success. The common people gradually became Christian, and so also did educated men, who thus added the authority of the schools to a teaching accepted by the feelings and innate inclination of the race, and hence followed the theological development of Christian dogma.

"These new principles and beliefs, eventually accepted by all the nations of Europe, both barbarous and civilized, not only brought to perfection the religious intuition characteristic of the morality and civilization of the race, but they produced a new and renovating power in historical and social life. This fresh virtue consisted in the belief in a power consubstantially divine and human. Although the pagan gods were human in their extrinsic and intrinsic form, only differing from mortals by their mighty privileges, yet they were personally distinct from men, and while the acts of Olympus mingled with those of earth, they had an habitation and destinies apart. But by the new dogma, the one God who was a Spirit took on him the substance of man and was united with humanity as a whole, according to the Pauline interpretation, which was generally accepted by our race. The divine nature was continually imparted to man, the body and members in which the divine spirit was incarnated, since the Church or mystical community of Christians was the temple of God. Through this lively sense of the divine incarnation, the Christian avatar with which the race had been acquainted under other forms, God was no longer essentially distinguished from mankind in the form of a number of concrete beings, but was spiritually infused into men and acted through them. The Christian as man felt himself to be a participator with God himself by a mystic intercourse. Since, therefore, the human faculty was historically identical with the divine, and shared in the spiritual work which was to effect the redemption of society, this new and Christian civilization added daring, confidence, and virtue to the natural energy of the race.

"Not many years elapsed before men ceased to contemplate the immediate end of the world predicted by the first apostles and the Apocalypse; they looked forward to a more distant future, and except in the case of some particular sects, they applied the prophecies which referred to the first generation of Christians to the future history of the race. It was therefore Christianity which introduced into the consciousness of our Aryan peoples the principles of a divine historic power acting on the social economy of mankind, and in this way the natural dignity and enterprising pride of the race was increased. Through this fresh religious intuition and spiritual exaltation, the purity and moral sweetness of the Semitic Nazarene became the law of society, and the church organization gradually assimilated everything to itself, and received divine worship in the person of the supreme Pontiff, who continued for many ages to be the temporal ruler of consciences, of public institutions, and of civilization. Strange daring in a race which from its early beginnings down to our own days has been always true to its own character, and in one form or other has displayed vigour, energy, ambition, transforming power, and great designs.

"This remarkable process could only go on in and through those peoples whose vigour and pride equalled their physical strength; to whom it is death to sit still, and life to be always busy, to transform all things to their own image, to dominate over all—over God by the intellect, over the world by science, over other races by force of arms. After the anthropomorphic form was given to natural phenomena, which is done to some extent by all races, the gods were made in the image of man; full of aesthetic imagination, of grand and vigorous conceptions, they modified and transformed the truth of the Semitic idea, to suit their own genius and imagination, and in this way they produced the wonderful fabric of Christian civilization and of Catholicism. They alone accepted a teaching which infused new spirit into social life and produced the rule of religion over the world, and the race still stands alone in the maintenance of its beliefs, to which science has added the powerful simplicity of the Semitic idea, and their vigorous influence has perpetuated and perfected human progress upon earth.[30] The Aryan race attained to the Semitic conception in its purity and cosmic reality by the process of reason, and only because it was endowed with all the civilizing and moral qualities which were acquired in so many ages of moral and intellectual energy, has the old conception been so vigorous and productive.

"The Semitic race, on the other hand, adhered to their old faith, rejected Christianity, as it had been formulated by the Aryans, and had little influence on the world. The Israelites, indeed, dispersed among other nations, retained the idea of the one spiritual God in all its purity, and civilization would have been much indebted to them for this rational idea of God if they had more clearly understood its scientific bearing and the nature of man; many of them are indeed justly entitled to fame in every department of science. But taken by themselves and as a people, they had little effect on civilization, since they lacked the energy of purpose, courage, mental superiority, and imagination, which create a durable and powerful civilization.

"The Arabs, aroused for a time by Mahometan fanaticism, overran great part of Europe, Asia, and Africa, but without influencing civilization. While in possession of a great and productive idea, they remained a sterile and nomad people, or founded unproductive dynasties. For the Semitic race, the interval between God and man, and consequently between God and civilization, was and is infinite, impassable. The Arabs possessed nothing but the devastating force of proselytism to fertilize their minds and social relations; and, with the exception of architecture, geography, and cognate sciences, they were for the most part only the transmitters of the science of others. We, on the contrary, filled up the gulf by placing the Man-God between God and man, and civilization has a power and vigour which has never flagged, and which, now that dogma is transformed into reason, will not flag while the world lasts."[31]

This extract from a work published many years ago, seems to me to confirm the theory of myths which I have explained; it shows how they are ultimately fused into a simple form, in conformity with the ideas of civilized society, and it will also throw light on what is to follow.

If we consider the primitive genesis and evolution of myth, confirmed by all the facts of history and ethnography, it will appear that although the matter on which thought was exercised was mythical and fanciful, the form and organizing method were the same as those of science. It is, in fact, a scientific process to observe, spontaneously at first, and then deliberately, the points of likeness and unlikeness between special objects of perception; we must rise from the particular to the general, from the individual to the species, thus ever enlarging the circle of observation, in order to arrive at types, laws, and ultimate unity, or at least a unity supposed to be ultimate, to which everything is reduced. So that the mythical faculty of thought was scientific in its logical form, and was exercised in the same way as the scientific faculty.

But science does not merely consist in the systematic arrangement of facts in which it begins, nor in their combination into general and comprehensive laws; the sequence of causes and effects must also be understood, and it is not enough to classify the fact without explaining its genesis and cause. We have seen that the innate faculty of perception involved the idea of a cause in the supposition that the phenomenon was actuated by a subject, and while thought classified fetishes and idols in a mythical way, an inherent power for good or evil was ascribed to them, not only in their relation to man, but in their effects on nature. What Vico has called "the poetry of physics" consisted in the explanation of natural phenomena by the efficacy of mythical and supernatural agents. From this point of view again, myth and science pursue identically the same method and the same general form of cognition.

Nor is this all. Science is, in fact, the de-personification of myth, arriving at a rational idea of that which was originally a fantastic type by divesting it of its wrappings and symbols. In the natural evolution of myth, man passes from the extrinsic mythical substance to the intrinsic ideal by the same intellectual process, and when the types have become ideas, he carries on intrinsically the entifying process which he first applied to the material and external phenomena.

In this case also the process is gradual; by attempting a more rational explanation of physical phenomena, man attains to ultimate conceptions which express direct cosmic laws, and he regards these laws as substantial entities, which in their originally polytheistic form were the gods who directed all things. Here the scientific myth really begins, since natural forces and phenomena are no longer personified in anthropomorphic beings; but the laws or general principles of physics are transformed into material subjects, which are still analogous to human consciousness and tendencies, although the idolatrous anthropomorphism has disappeared.

The combination of myth and science in the human mind does not stop here, since, as I have said, it goes on to form ideal representations. When thought penetrates more deeply into the physical laws of the universe, and is also more rationally engaged in the psychical examination of man's own nature, ideas are classified in more general types, as in the primitive construction of fetishes, anthropomorphic idols, and physical principles; and in this way an explicit and purely ideal system is formed, in which the images correspond with the fanciful and physical types which were previously created.

It usually happens that thought, by the innate faculty of which we have so often spoken, regards the ideas produced by this complex mental labour as material entities endowed with eternal and independent existence; and this produced the Platonic teaching, the schools in Greece and Italy, and other brilliant illustrations of this phase of thought. Such teaching, the result of explicit reflection, is a rival of the critical science which followed from it. It is always active, while constantly varying and assuming fresh forms; and it not only flourishes in our time in the religions in which it finds a suitable soil, but also, as we shall see, in science itself.

In addition to this complex evolution of myth as a whole, special myths follow similar laws; since they are generated from the same facts, and pass through the same phases, they culminate in a partial ideality, and this involves a simple and comprehensive law of the phenomena in question, and even a moral or providential order. For example, we may trace the Promethean myth to the end of the Hellenic era, and the different phases and final extinction of this particular myth are quite apparent.

The origin of the myth, which was directly connected with the perception of the natural phenomena of light and heat, was due to the same causes as all others, but we will consider it in its Vedic phase, as it may be gathered from tradition, and from the discoveries of comparative philology, and we have a sure guide in this research in the great linguist Kuhn, whose remarks have been enlarged and illustrated by Baudry.

The Sanscrit word for the act of producing fire by friction is manthami, to rub or agitate, and this appears from its derivative mandala, a circle; that is, circular friction. The pieces of wood used for the production of fire were called pramantha, that which revolves, and arani was the disc on which the friction was made. In this phase, the fetishes are, according to our theory, in the second stage. The Greeks and Romans, and indeed almost all other peoples, knew no other way of kindling a fire, and in the sacred rites of the Peruvians the task was assigned to the Incas at the annual festival of fire. The wood of the oak was used in Germany, on account of the red colour of its bark, which led to the supposition that the god of fire was concealed in it. Tan is called lohe, or flame, in Germany. This primitive mode of kindling a fire was known to the Aryans before their dispersion, and friction with this object was equivalent to the birth of the fire-god, constraining him to come down to earth from the air, from thunder, etc.; indeed fire was also called dueta, the messenger between heaven and earth. The question arose who had drawn fire from heaven, and developed it in the arani. A resemblance was also traced between the instruments for kindling fire and the organs of generation, a reciprocal interchange of various myths, as we have before observed. Agni is concealed in arani, like the embryo in the womb (Rig-Veda). Thus pramantha is the masculine instrument, arani the feminine, and the act of uniting them is copulation.

Agni had disappeared from earth and was concealed in a cavern, whence it was drawn by a divine person; that is, fire had disappeared and was concealed within the arani, whence it was extracted by the pramantha and bestowed upon man. Mataricvan, the divine deliverer, is therefore only the personification of the male organ.

In virtue of the idea that the soul is a spark, and that the production of fire resembles generation, Bhrigu, lightning, is a creator. The son of Bhrigu marries the daughter of Manu, and they have a son who at his birth breaks his mother's thigh, and therefore takes the name of Aurva (from uru a thigh). This is only the lightning which rends the clouds asunder.

Many Graeco-Latin myths, beginning with that of Prometheus must be referred to Mataricvan and to the Bhrigu, and we can trace in the name of Prometheus the equivalent of a Sanscrit form pramathyus, one who obtains fire by friction. Prometheus is, in fact, the ravisher of celestial fire (a phase of the polytheistic myth in a perfectly human form); he is a divine pramantha. It is Prometheus who in one version of the myth cleaves open the head of Zeus, and causes Athene, the goddess who uses the lightning as her spear, to issue from it. The Greeks afterwards carried on the evolution of myth in its transition from the physical to the moral phenomenon, and, forgetful of his origin, they made Prometheus into a seer. As Bhrigu, he created man of earth and water, and breathed into him the spark of life. Villemarque tells us that in Celtic antiquity there was an analogous myth, as we might naturally expect, since the Celts belong to the Aryan stock; Gwenn-Aran (albus superus) was a supernatural being which issued like lightning from a cloud.

The more thoughtful Greeks did not limit the Promethean myth to the idol and to anthropomorphic fancies, but it passed into a moral conception, and we have a proof of this transition in AEschylus.

In fact, as Silvestro Centofonti observes in a lecture on the characteristics of Greek literature, the grand figure of the AEschylean Prometheus is a poetic personification of Thought, and of its mysterious fates in the sphere of life as a whole. First, in its eternal existence, as a primitive and organic force in the system of the world; then in the order of human things, fettered by the bonds of civilization, and subject to the necessities, lusts, and evils which constantly, arise from the union of soul and matter in unsatisfied mortals. Thought is itself the source of tormenting cares in this earthly slavery, yet the sense of power makes it invincible, firm in its purpose to endure all sufferings, to be superior to all events; assured of future freedom, and always on the way to achieve it by reverting to the grandeur of its innate perfection; finally attaining to this happy state, by shaking off all the enslaving bonds and anxious cares of the kingdom of Zeus, and by obtaining a perfect life through the inspirations of wisdom, when the revolutions of the heavens should fill the earth with divine power, and restore the happiness of primeval times. It is evident that in this stupendous tragedy AEschylus is leading us to the truth in a threefold sense: aesthetic, morally political, and cosmic. The supreme idea which sums up the whole value of the composition is perhaps that of an inevitable reciprocity of action and reaction between mind and effective force, between the primitive providence of nature and the subsequent laws of art, both in the civilization of mankind and in the order and life of the universe.

In this way the evolution of the special myth was transformed into poetry by the interweaving, collection, and fusion with other myths, and in the minds of a higher order it was resolved into an allegory or symbol of the forces of nature, into providential laws or a moral conception.

This law of progressive transformation also occurs in the successive modifications of the special meaning of words, so far as they indicate not only the thing itself, but the image which gave rise to the primitive roots. For a long while, those who heard the word were not only conscious of the object which it represented, but of its image, which thus became a source of aesthetic enjoyment to them. As time went on, this image was no longer reproduced, and the bare indication remained, until the word gradually lost all material representation, and became an algebraical sign, which merely recalled the object in question to the mind.

When, for example, we now use the word (coltello), coulter, the instrument indicated by this phonetic sign immediately recurs to the mind and nothing else; the intelligence would see no impropriety in the use of some other sign if it were generally intelligible. But in the times of primitive speech, the inventors of this rude instrument were conscious of the material image which gave rise to it, and they were likewise conscious of all the cognate images which diverged from the same root, and in this way a brief but vivid drama was presented to the imagination.

If we examine this word with Pictet and others, we shall find that the name of the plough comes from the Sanscrit krt, krnt, kart, to cleave or divide. Hence krntatra, a plough or dividing instrument. The root krt subsequently became kut or kutt, to which we must refer kuta, kutaka, the body of the plough. This root krt, kart, is found in many European languages in the general sense of cutting or breaking, as in the old Slav word kratiti, to cut off. It is also applied to labour and its instruments: kartoti, to plough over again, karta, a line or furrow, and in the Vedic Sanscrit, karta, a ditch or hole. Hence the Latin culter a saw, cultellus, a coulter, and the Sanscrit kartari, a coulter. The Slav words for the mole which burrows in the earth are connected with the root krt, or the Slav krat. In very remote times, men not only understood the object indicated in the word for a coulter, but they were sensible of the image of the primitive krt and its affixes, which were likewise derived from the primitive images, and with these they included the cognate images of the several derivatives from the root. In these days the word coulter and the Sanscrit kartari are simply signs or phonetic notations, insignificant in themselves, and everything else has disappeared. But in primitive times an image animated the word, which by the necessary faculty of perception so often described was transformed into a kind of subject which effected the action indicated by the root. As this personality gradually faded away, the actual representation of the image was lost, and even its remote echo finally vanished, while the phonetic notation remained, devoid of life and memory, and without the recurrence of cognate images which strengthened the original idea by association. All words undergo the like evolution, and this may be called the mythical evolution of speech.

Thus the Sanscrit word for daughter is duhitar; in Persian it is dochtar, in Greek [Greek: Thugater], in Gothic dauhtar, in German Tochter. The word is derived from the root duh, to milk, since this was the girl's business in a pastoral family. The sign still remains, but it has lost its meaning, since the image and the drama have vanished. This analysis applies to all languages, and it may also be traced in the words for numbers. The number five, for example, among the Aryans and in many other tongues, signifies hand. This is the case in Thibet, in Siam, and cognate languages, in the Indian Archipelago and in the whole of Oceania, in Africa, and in many of the American peoples and tribes, where it is the origin of the decimal system. In Homer we find the verb [Greek: pempazein], to count in fives, and then for counting in general; in Lapland lokket, and in Finland lukea, to count, is derived from lokke, ten; and the Bambarese adang, to count, is the origin of tank, ten.

When the numerical idea of five was first grasped, the conception was altogether material, and was expressed by the image of the five-fingered hand. In the mind of the earliest rude calculators, the number five was presented to them as a material hand, and the word involved a real image, of which they became conscious in uttering it. The number and the hand were consequently fused together in their respective images, and signified something actually combined together, which effected in a material form the genesis of this numerical representation. But the material entity gradually disappeared, the image faded and was divested of its personality, and only the phonetic notation five remained, which no longer recalls a hand, the origin of the several numerals, nor words connected with it. It is now a mere sign, apart from any rational idea. The same may be said of the other numerals.

We give these few examples, which apply to all words, since they all follow the same course, beginning with the real and primitive image, subjectively effecting their peculiar meaning. Hence we see how the intrinsic law of myth is evolved in every human act in diverse ways, but always with the same results.

In fact, before articulate speech, for which man was adapted by his organs and physiological conditions, was formulated into words for things and words for shape, man like animals thought in images; he associated and dissociated, he composed and decomposed, he moved and removed images, which sufficed for all individual and immediate operations of his mind. The relations of things were felt, or rather seen through his inward representation of them as in a picture, expressing in a material form the respective positions of figures and objects which, since they are remote from him, can only be expressed by such words as nearer, lower or higher, faint or clear, by more vivid or paler tints, such as we see in a running stream, in the forms of clouds, in the reciprocal relations of all objects represented in painting.