In abstract, intellectual conceptions, such as those of equality, distance, number, and the like, the same faculty and the same elements are at work as in those which express physical and moral qualities.  These conceptions, which as civilization advances ultimately become mere intellectual symbols necessary for logical speech, are at first formed by the actual comparison of things, and therefore by the aid of the senses.  Even if we were to assert with some schools of thought that they were formed a priori in the mind, sensation would still be necessary as the occasion of displaying them.  When such conceptions are expressed in words there is a physiological recurrence to the mind of what may be termed the shadow of previous sensations or perceptions, which are united in an intellectual type to give rise to such conceptions.  And in the appearance of this phenomenal basis, thought unconsciously fulfils the fundamental law of assuming, or I might say of actually feeling, the reality of the subject.

It must be remembered that in speaking of these entities created by the intellect, I refer to the primitive ages of human thought, or to the notions of ignorant people, and also to the spontaneous language of educated men, who in ordinary conversation do not pause to consider the simple and logical value of their expressions.  We are only giving the natural history of the intelligence, which necessarily excludes the analytic and refining processes of rational science.  An educated man will, for example, say or write that identity is a most important principle of logic as well as that of contradiction, although he is perfectly aware that such expressions only imply an abstract form of cognition; he follows the natural and primitive process of the intellect, and for the moment expresses these conceptions as if they were real entities in the organism of science and of the world.  Any one may find a proof of this fact in himself, if he will consider the ideas immediately at work in his mind at the moment of expressing similar conceptions.  And if this is true of those who pursue a rational course of thought, it is true in a still more imaginative and mythical sense at the dawn of intellectual life, both among modern savages and in the case of the ignorant common people.

Let us briefly sum up the truth we have sought to establish.  Special fetishes first had their origin by the innate exercise and historical development of the human intelligence, by the necessary conditions of the perception, and of subsequent apprehension; these were only the animation of each external or internal phenomenon, as it occurred, and this was the primitive origin of myth, both in man and animals.  In the case of animals the fetish or special myth is transitory, appearing and disappearing in accordance with his actual perceptions; while in man there is a persistent image of the fetish in his mind, to which he timidly ascribes the same power as to the thing itself.  The specific types of these fetishes naturally arise from the mental combination of images, emotions, and ideas into a whole, and these impersonations generate the various forms of anthropomorphic polytheism.  As the synthetic mental process goes on, these varied forms of polytheism are gradually united in one general but still anthropomorphic form, which is commonly called monotheism.