watch the mental growth of children, and of ignorant and untaught
adults.

While the mythical intelligence continues as before to give its habitual
mythical interpretation of many natural phenomena, the use is gradually
acquired of special and generic symbols which express special and
specific ideas, and these no longer include a personification of the
individual thing or idea. Without this intrusion of rational ideas any
progress would be impossible, as well as the power of expressing all
which time and education present to the mind, and gradually enable it to
comprehend; the fanciful image is fused in a rational conception, which
is, however, not yet definite and explicit.

What are commonly termed abstract ideas arise from this necessity, as
the result of the perfection and development of speech, but these were
not at first abstract, although they made use of the abstract idea.
Unconscious abstraction is certainly one of the primary acts of the
intelligence, since abstraction follows from the consideration of a part
or of some parts of a whole, which are themselves presented as a whole
to the perception. But this primitive abstraction was so far a concrete
fact for the perception, in that each act of the apprehension
constituted a phenomenon of which the apparent character was abstracted
from the other parts which formed a whole, and was transformed into a
living subject, as we have already shown at length. The really explicit
abstraction, to which man only attained after many ages, consisting in
the simple representation of a quality or part of a thing, could not at
that time be effected, although special and specific ideas gradually
found their way into thought and speech. All the terms for form and
relation in primitive speech, and also among modern savages, confirm
this assertion, as linguists are aware; the form and relation now