As I have already said, the study of the beginnings and of, the anthropological conditions of the various myths is necessary to enable us to understand their psychical phenomena, together with the hidden laws of the exercise of thought.  The learned and illustrious Ribot has justly said that psychology, dissociated from physiology and cognate sciences, is extinct, and that in order to bring it to life it is necessary to follow the progress and methods of all other contemporary sciences.[7] The genesis of myth, its development, the specification and integration of its beliefs, as well as the several intrinsic and extrinsic sources whence it proceeds, will assign to it a clearer place among the obscure recesses of psychical facts; they will reveal to us the connection between the facts of consciousness and their antecedents, between the world and our normal and abnormal physiological conditions; they will show what a complex drama is performed by the action and reaction between ourselves and the things within us, and also will declare the nature of the laws which govern the various and manifold creation of forms, imaginations, and ideas, and the artificial world of phantasms derived from these.  In this way myth will appear to be not merely due to the direct animation of things, varying in our waking state with the nature of the exciting cause; but it also arises from the normal images and illusions of dreams, and from the morbid hallucinations of madness, both subjectively in the case of the person affected by them, and objectively for those who observe the extrinsic effects in gesture and speech, and the whole bearing of the sufferer.

Every one must admit that all these phenomena, and the beliefs which arise from them, must tend to make the observation of psychical life more easy, just as morbid psychical phenomena often explain the natural action of such life under normal conditions.  These phenomena, so closely connected with physiological disturbances which are beyond the control of our personal will, will inform us of the biological relations between consciousness and thought on the one side, and our organism on the other.

The mythical faculty, as we shall see in the following chapters, combined with physiological excitements, both normal and abnormal, generally assumes constant forms in the various and manifold world of its creation; constant forms which conversely also reveal those of the scientific faculty.  In this way the development, composition, and integration of a myth, into which others are fused by assimilation, may be said to explain to us the mode in which systems of philosophy are constituted, and to manifest to us in a fanciful way the underlying mode in which human thought is exercised.