Just as the act of respiration is a faint wind which goes on whether in sleep or wakefulness, and only ceases with death, so it was with the phenomenon of nature which attracted their attention, and it was invested by them with life.  Since the winds of nature had already been animated and personified by a spontaneous act, so our inmost being was certainly first considered as material, and impersonated as breath and air.

This appears from the roots and words of all languages; the Hebrew nephesh, nshamah, ruach—­soul or spirit—­are all derived from the idea of breathing.  The Greek word [Greek:  anemos], the Latin word animus, signify breathing, wind, soul, and spirit.  In the Sanscrit atman we have the successive meanings which show the evolution of the myth:  breathing, vital soul, intelligence, and then the individual, the ego.  In Polynesia we find the same process of things. To think, which in the Aryan tongues comes from the root c’i, and originally meant to collect, to comprehend, in German, begreifen, becomes in the Polynesian language, to talk in the belly.  It is, therefore, an evident historical fact that man first personified natural phenomena, and then made use of these personifications to personify his inward acts, his psychical ideas and conceptions.  This was the necessary process, since animals were prior to man, temporally and logically, and external idols were formed before those which were internal and peculiar to himself.[17]

It is true that man unconsciously, that is, without deliberation, not only animates external things and their specific types, but he also, by an exercise of memory, animates the psychical image of these special perceptions.  If, for example, the primitive man personifies a stream of water which he has seen to issue from a fissure of the rocks, and ascribes to it voluntary and intentional motion, he also animates the image which reappears in his sphere of thought, and conceives it to have a real existence.  He does not merely believe it to be a psychical and what may be called a photographic repetition of the thing, but rather to have an actual, concrete existence.  Thus, among all ancient peoples, and among many which are still in the condition of savages, the shadow of a man’s body is held to be substantial with it, and, as it were, his inmost essence, and for this reason the spirits of the dead were in several languages called shades.

Doubtless it is difficult for us to picture to ourselves the psychical conditions of primitive men, at a time when the objects of perception and the apprehension of things were presented by an effort of memory to the mind as if they were actual and living things, yet such conditions are not hypothetical but really existed, as any one may ascertain for himself who is able to realize that primitive state of the mind, and we have said enough to show that such was its necessary condition.