In this second stage to which myth spontaneously attained, it must be observed that all fetishes could not be reduced to a specific or typical image, since in nature, and in ages and conditions when the intelligence was still rude and uncultured, all phenomena or objects could not assume a specific form, but were still regarded as individuals.  In this class are the sun, the moon, certain stars and constellations, as well as some other natural phenomena, volcanoes, hot springs, and the like; since these were unique within the range of country inhabited by the savage hordes, they could not become specific.  Hence, while all other objects and their respective fetishes followed the natural evolution into a specific type, and through these into the simplest form of polytheism, the special fetish which referred to unique things or phenomena remained special, although it was modified, as we shall see, so as to harmonize with the aspect commonly assumed by other typical images.

It must be observed that we have gradually ascended from the special to the specific fetish, and to types which are resolved by the intelligence into more ideal and less concrete images; precisely because they are ideal and less bound to the form they had before, they are incarnated in an anthropomorphic and anthropopathic form.  Released from the necessity of regarding them in a vague form, or one different from that of man, the image becomes more human, and that not only as before in consciousness and purpose, but also in aspect and structure.

In fact, in this stage man does not merely infuse his spiritual essence into these types, but likewise his corporeal form, whence we have the true, human image of myth.  This may be seen in the various primitive Olympuses of all historic races as well as among savage peoples, only varying in the splendour of their imagery.  They consist in the transformation of the earlier fetish into an intelligent, corporeal person, and result from the formation and personification of types.

Beginning with the mysterious conception of some particular spring as a malignant or beneficent fetish which, although personified, still retains its concrete form, the classifying action of the intelligence gradually constructs, from its points of resemblance to other springs, a generic type which includes them all.  This typical conception, personified in its turn, next represents a unique power, of which all the individual and accidental springs are only manifestations.  Thus it is clear that man, in the personification of this type or specific conception, is no longer bound to the actual form of the special object which first represented it, but he may be said to mould a more indefinite and plastic substance into which he can with spontaneous or facile art incarnate his whole person.  Hence this substance will assume an anthropomorphic form, and will issue, not in a mysterious being of extrinsic and indefinite form, but in a person with human features, obvious to human senses.