We can understand something of the mysterious exercise of human intelligence in its earliest development from this habit of symbolizing and presenting in an outward form an abstract conception, thus giving a concrete meaning and material expression to the external fact.  We see how everything assumed a concrete, living form, and can better understand the conditions we have established as necessary in the early days of the development of human life.  This attitude of the intelligence has been often stated before, but in an incomplete way; the primitive and the subsequent myths have been confounded together, and it has been supposed that myth was of exclusively human origin, whereas it has its roots lower down in the vast animal kingdom.  We hope, therefore, that it will be granted that we have given the true and full exposition of myth.

Anthropomorphism, and the personification of the things and phenomena of nature, of their images and specific types, were the great source whence issued superstitions, mythologies, and religions, and also, as we shall presently see, the scientific errors to be found among all the families of the human race.

For the development of myth, which is in itself always a human personification of natural objects and phenomena in some form or other, the first and necessary foundation consists, as we have abundantly shown, in the conscious and deliberate vivification of objects by the perception and apprehension of animals.  And since this is a condition of animal perception, it is also the foundation of all human life, and of the spontaneous and innate exercise of the intelligence.  In fact, man, by a two-fold process, raises above his animal nature a world of images, ideas, and conceptions from the types he has formed of various phenomena, and his attitude towards this internal world does not differ from his attitude towards that which is external.  He personifies the images, ideas, and conceptions by transforming them into living subjects, just as he had originally personified cosmic objects and phenomena.

In myths, since they owe their origin to the reflex power which is gradually organized and developed, man carries on this faculty of personification which had already been exerted in him as an animal.  But the object of myth became two-fold just as the animal nature became duplex in man, whether as a special image of special conception, or as an intellectual definition of the specific type already formed.  The myths are, therefore, from their very nature, either special, that is, derived from the psychical duplication of a personified image; or they are specific, and are derived, as we are about to explain, from the personification of a type.