personified by the classifying process of types, they are transformed
into human images, and arranged in a hierarchy, and to this the various
religions and mythologies of the world owe their origin. Since such a
process is also the condition and form of knowledge, the source of myth
and science is fundamentally the same, for they are generated by the
same psychical fact. It is in this way that the progress of human
intelligence was developed in the course of ages; its attitude varies in
various races, but the impulses, the faculty, and its elements are
identical. I do not think that this unique fact in which myth and
science have their source has been observed before; still less has any
one defined the limits of human intelligence, and recognized in the
simple acts of animals the formal and absolute conditions of human
science, and the origin of myth.

If I am not deluded by a prejudice in favour of my own researches, this
theory is a contribution to truth. It is confirmed by the solidarity
which it establishes between the acts and laws of the psychical human
faculty, and that of animals which necessarily preceded it. No science
can be constituted without such solidarity; this great truth was felt
and, after their manner, demonstrated by scholastic philosophers, or, as
it was afterwards scientifically expressed by the genius of Leibnitz:
_Natura non facit saltum!_




CHAPTER VI.

THE INTRINSIC LAW OF THE FACULTY OF APPREHENSION.