abstract conceptions. The sensation of the quality, and consequently of
the phenomenon, is reproduced, and the phenomenon generates the implicit
idea of a subject, and therefore of a possible cause in given
circumstances. If such a law did not produce upon man the mythical
personification of his primitive abstract conceptions, at any rate it
involved a belief in the objective reality of these conceptions, which
were implicitly held to possess an independent existence.

Among prehistoric and savage races, who were ignorant of the laws and
nature of cosmic forces, the greater or less weight of a thing did not
involve any examination of the mass of a phenomenon, its distance, and
the general laws of gravity; this differential weight was itself
believed to be a thing which acted, and sometimes deliberately, acted in
different ways on the different objects which they were comparing at the
moment. In other words, gravity was regarded as something which existed
independently of the bodies in which its properties were manifested.

This estimate of gravity, as an abstract quality or property, might be
repeated of all other physical properties, as well as of those abstract
conceptions which are moral and intellectual. Goodness came to be
considered as a type, varying indeed in different peoples, according to
their race, and their local, moral, and civil conditions, but as a type
which corresponded to the mutual relations of men, and to their
superstitions and religious beliefs as to the nature of things.

In this case also the abstract conception of the good, the fitting, the
useful, which constantly recur in popular speech are regarded, not as
mythical powers personified in a human form, but as having a real
existence in nature, as something extrinsic to the person or thing in
which they are manifested, and as acting upon them as a living and