may find a proof of this fact in himself, if he will consider the ideas
immediately at work in his mind at the moment of expressing similar
conceptions. And if this is true of those who pursue a rational course
of thought, it is true in a still more imaginative and mythical sense at
the dawn of intellectual life, both among modern savages and in the case
of the ignorant common people.

Let us briefly sum up the truth we have sought to establish. Special
fetishes first had their origin by the innate exercise and historical
development of the human intelligence, by the necessary conditions of
the perception, and of subsequent apprehension; these were only the
animation of each external or internal phenomenon, as it occurred, and
this was the primitive origin of myth, both in man and animals. In the
case of animals the fetish or special myth is transitory, appearing and
disappearing in accordance with his actual perceptions; while in man
there is a persistent image of the fetish in his mind, to which he
timidly ascribes the same power as to the thing itself. The specific
types of these fetishes naturally arise from the mental combination of
images, emotions, and ideas into a whole, and these impersonations
generate the various forms of anthropomorphic polytheism. As the
synthetic mental process goes on, these varied forms of polytheism are
gradually united in one general but still anthropomorphic form, which is
commonly called monotheism.

In addition to these spontaneous and anthropomorphic myths, which serve
for the fanciful explanation of the system of the world, and the moral
ideas of social and individual life, other myths arise which are not
anthropomorphic, but which ascribe a substantial existence to abstract
conceptions of physical, moral, or intellectual matters; conceptions
necessary for the formulation of human speech. For although primitive