From these examples, and indeed we might say from the whole of speech, especially if we go back to the primitive value of words and to their roots, it appears to what a vast extent man originally projected himself, his consciousness, emotions, and purposes into inanimate things; and how, even under the historical conditions of civilization, he still personifies the world, and ascribes to it the forms of his own body and limbs.

Again, we have plainly shown that man, by the intrinsic reduplication of his psychical faculty, spontaneously retains and personifies the inward phantasm generated by such a projection of special natural objects on his perception.  In the genesis of such fetishes, and also when, by an effort of will, he recalls them to his mind, this faculty with its constituent elements is brought into action.  In fact, when the image is recalled to the mind, it is represented like the external phenomenon; and consequently it involves and generates the thing of which the phenomenon is the external vest, that is, its causative power; and in this way the objective process of its formation is inwardly reproduced.  Since the cosmic reality is thus ideally reproduced, the inward substance of the fetish assumes a really efficacious power, whether in its extrinsic form, or in its intrinsic image, and in this way primitive superstitions had their source.

In the case of savage and primitive man the inward image of the fetish without its bodily presence is, owing to the process already described, not merely valid as a real entity, but it becomes a mysterious apparition in the sphere of fancy, in a way analogous to our belief in the reality of things seen in a dream or in moments of hallucination.  This appears in the history of all peoples past and present, whence it is certain that primitive man not only formed personifications of external objects and of his own emotions, but also of their images, as they were retained in his memory.  In both cases the sequence of the three elements of apprehension, the phenomenon, subject, and cause, is due to the same unique faculty; in a word, the inward perception is identical in its genesis and laws with that which is external.

These are not the only results which follow from the exercise of this faculty.  By the spontaneous classifying action of our intelligence we rise from the perception of special and individual objects and phenomena to their various types, and hence to an inward and ideal world of specific representations, as if these were causative powers, informing the multitude of analogous and similar phenomena in which they are manifested.  These specific types, which are more strongly present to the fancy in the primitive exercise of the intelligence, also become personified, and they generate what is called polytheism in all its forms, varying according to the races, times, places, and respective conditions of morality and civilization in which they are found.