exercise of his intelligence, to refer them to a single type, and in this way the specific idea of a tree is evolved in his mind and fixed in his memory.  The same thing gradually takes place with respect to flowers, animals, springs, rivers, and the like.  These ideal types are not wholly wanting even among the most barbarous peoples, in the most concrete and dissimilar languages, since without them any language would be impossible.

The same intrinsic and innate necessity which, both in man and animals, automatically effects the animation and personification of consciousness and will in the case of external objects and phenomena, also impels man to vivify and personify the specific types which he has gradually formed, and they take an objective place in his memory as the objects of nature do in the case of animals.  In this way man does not, like animals, merely vivify the special oak or chestnut tree presented to him in a concrete form at a given moment, but he vivifies in the same way the psychical type of trees, of flowers, etc., which has been evolved in his mind, just as he vivifies the type of suffering, of disease, of death, of healing, or of any other force.

For this reason the process of necessary and spontaneous personification is at first two-fold; namely, the personification of individual and external objects and phenomena, and that of their specific inward types, whether of the objects themselves or of their sensations and emotions.  It must be observed that at this early stage of man’s history, specific types, or the classification of things, were not ordered and determined with scientific precision; they were undefined and confused, running more or less into each other, so as to be easily lost, or constantly diverging more widely.  This internal movement of images and undefined conceptions was a stimulus to active and mobile life, and an abundant source of vivid or obscure myths, and of the sentiments corresponding to them.

These specific primordial types were openly referred to external phenomena, and were based upon the life of nature, since rational or scientific ideas had not yet made their appearance, or only very sparsely.  In any case, the reality of these types and their animation are facts, as all the earliest records attest, whether among civilized or savage races.

The personification of specific types, which are in general the most obvious—­those, namely, which refer to animals, vegetables, minerals, and meteors, things useful or injurious to man—­is the origin of the subsequent belief in fetishes, genii, demons, and spirits, and these led to the vivification of the whole of nature, her laws, customs, and forces.  Man’s personification of himself, his projection of himself as a living being into external things, was the result of reflection.  In fact, the impersonation of the winds took place in very early times, since they most frequently and universally excited the attention and anxiety of man and animals, whether beneficially or otherwise, and by their mechanical action, their whistling and other sounds, they readily struck the mobile fancy of primitive men, and also of savage and ignorant peoples in our day.