Myth, as it is understood by us, and as It will be developed and
explained in this work, cannot be defined in summary terms, since its
multiform and comprehensive nature embraces and includes all primitive
action, as well as much which is consecutive and historical in the
intelligence and feelings of man, with respect to the immediate and the
reflex interpretation of the world, of the Individual, and of the
society in which our common life is passed.

We hold that myth is, in its most general and comprehensive nature, the
spontaneous and imaginative form in which the human intelligence and
human emotions conceive and represent themselves and things in general;
it is the psychical and physical mode in which man projects himself into
all those phenomena which he is able to apprehend and perceive.[1]

We do not propose to consider in this treatise the myths peculiar to one
people, nor to one race; we do not seek to estimate the intrinsic value
of myths at the time when they were already developed among various
peoples, and constituted into an Olympus, or special religion; we do not
wish to determine the special and historical cause of their
manifestations in the life of any one people, since we now refrain from
entering on the field of comparative mythology. It is the scope and
object of our modest researches to trace the strictly primitive origin
of the human myths as a whole; to reach the ultimate fact, and the
causes of this fact, whence myth, in its necessary and universal form,
is evolved and has its origin.

We must therefore seek to discover whether, in addition to the various
causes assigned for myth in earlier ages, and still more in modern times