Those readers who have gone with us so far will perceive that these were not mere accidents of rare occurrence in animal life, but that they are the necessary effect of mythical representation in its first stage, although they cannot in any way be supposed to be produced by fetishism, properly so called.  For if the dog were frightened and agitated by the movement of the umbrella, or ran away, as Herbert Spencer tells us, from the stick which had hurt him while he was playing with it, it was because an unusual movement or pain produced by an object to which habit had rendered him indifferent, aroused in the animal the congenital sense of the intentional subjectivity of phenomena, and this is really the first stage of myth, and not of its subsequent form of fetishism.

I must therefore repeat that the first form of myth which spontaneously arises in man as an animal, is the vague but intentional subjectivity of the phenomena presented to his senses.  This subjectivity is sometimes quiescent and implicit, and sometimes active, in which case it may arouse the fear of evil, or the hope of physical pleasures.

As in man the reflex power slowly and gradually grows—­although at first in an exclusively empirical form—­so he slowly and gradually accepts the first form of fetishism, which consists in the permanent and fixed individuation of a phenomenon or object of nature, as a power which he reflectively believes to be the artificer of good or evil.

In this stage it is no longer the phenomenon actually present which arouses the apprehension of an intentional subjectivity, while its image and efficacy disappear with the sensible object; the phenomenon, or the inanimate or animate form, is reflectively retained by the memory, in which it appears as a malignant or benignant power.  In a word, the first stage of fetishism, which is the second form of the evolution of myth, is the universal and primitive sense of myth in nature, which man alone is capable of applying permanently to some given phenomenon, such as wind, rain, and the like, or lakes, volcanoes, and rocks, and these remain fixed in the mind as powers of good or evil.  In the earlier stage of myth the scene is constantly changing, while in the latter, certain objects or phenomena remain fixed in the memory, exciting the same emotions whether they are present or absent, and to this consciousness we may trace the dawn of worship.

Ethnography affords plain proofs of the fetishism which preceded the civilization of many peoples, and among those which still remain in the stage of fetishism we can trace the primitive form of a vague impersonation of natural objects and phenomena.[28]

As we have already seen, every animal and unfamiliar object is in this first stage of fetishism regarded as the external covering of a spiritual power which has assumed what is believed to be the primordial form of the fetish; this fetish takes the place of the natural phenomenon, and is believed to be capable of exercising a direct subjectivity which is vague but perfectly real.