Nor could it be otherwise.  The internal activity and intrinsic sense of conscious and deliberate life which inspires animals and men, while the latter are still ignorant of the rational order of things, is necessarily reflected both in the external objects of perception and in the internal emotions, as if they were operating causes independent of the will of the percipient.  It is impossible for an animal, which is unable by voluntary observation to make, any analytic distinction between the subject and the object, and their respective effects, to consider such phenomena as mechanical entities, subject to necessary and eternal laws.  The animal therefore accepts the idea suggested by his spontaneous and subjective nature, that these phenomena are alive.  Grass, fruits, plants, water, the movement of material bodies, ordinary and extraordinary meteors, all are implicitly apprehended by him as subjects endowed with will and purpose after the manner of mankind.  Nor can the living subjectivity of the phenomenon ever be gauged by the animal in whom the deliberate power of reflection is wanting.  His life is consequently passed in a world of living subjects, not of phenomena and laws which mechanically act together; it is, so to speak, a permanent metaphor.

Man himself, so far as his animal nature is concerned, acts in the same way, and although he subsequently attains to the exercise of reasoning powers in virtue of the psychical reduplication of himself, the primitive faculty persists, and hence comes the mythical creation of a peculiar world of conceptions which give rise to all superstitions, mythologies, and religions.  This is also the process of science itself, as far as the classifying method and intrinsic logical form are concerned.  The historical source of the two great streams of the intellect, the mythical and the scientific, is found in the primitive act of entifying the phenomenon presented to the senses.

We must briefly describe the evolution of these two mythical and scientific faculties of the mind; we must investigate the mode and cause of their divergence from a common source, through what transformations they pass, in order to see in what way the one is gradually dried up, while the other increases in volume and force.  The reader must forgive us if we use some repetition in developing a subject on which we have already touched, since without such repetition the present historical explanation would be obscure.

The first stage of knowledge consists in the observation of the things which surround us, and this first stage, which is necessary also in science, is the common property of animals.  Their observation of themselves and of external things is psychologically and physiologically the same as that of man, and in both cases there is a subjective animation of the phenomena themselves.  The primitive source of science in its observation of phenomena was the same as that of myth and of the special fetish; without such observation it would have had no existence.