When the numerical idea of five was first grasped, the conception was altogether material, and was expressed by the image of the five-fingered hand.  In the mind of the earliest rude calculators, the number five was presented to them as a material hand, and the word involved a real image, of which they became conscious in uttering it.  The number and the hand were consequently fused together in their respective images, and signified something actually combined together, which effected in a material form the genesis of this numerical representation.  But the material entity gradually disappeared, the image faded and was divested of its personality, and only the phonetic notation five remained, which no longer recalls a hand, the origin of the several numerals, nor words connected with it.  It is now a mere sign, apart from any rational idea.  The same may be said of the other numerals.

We give these few examples, which apply to all words, since they all follow the same course, beginning with the real and primitive image, subjectively effecting their peculiar meaning.  Hence we see how the intrinsic law of myth is evolved in every human act in diverse ways, but always with the same results.

In fact, before articulate speech, for which man was adapted by his organs and physiological conditions, was formulated into words for things and words for shape, man like animals thought in images; he associated and dissociated, he composed and decomposed, he moved and removed images, which sufficed for all individual and immediate operations of his mind.  The relations of things were felt, or rather seen through his inward representation of them as in a picture, expressing in a material form the respective positions of figures and objects which, since they are remote from him, can only be expressed by such words as nearer, lower or higher, faint or clear, by more vivid or paler tints, such as we see in a running stream, in the forms of clouds, in the reciprocal relations of all objects represented in painting.

In order to understand the primeval process of thought by means of images, it is necessary to conceive such a picture as living and mobile, and constantly forming a fresh combination of parts.  Animals have not, and primeval man had not, the phonetic signs or words which give an individual character to the images, and so represent them that by combining these images in an articulate form, thought may be represented by signs; and in and through these a universal and objective mode of exercising the intellectual faculty of reasoning has been created.