extrinsic sources whence it proceeds, will assign to it a clearer place
among the obscure recesses of psychical facts; they will reveal to us
the connection between the facts of consciousness and their antecedents,
between the world and our normal and abnormal physiological conditions;
they will show what a complex drama is performed by the action and
reaction between ourselves and the things within us, and also will
declare the nature of the laws which govern the various and manifold
creation of forms, imaginations, and ideas, and the artificial world of
phantasms derived from these. In this way myth will appear to be not
merely due to the direct animation of things, varying in our waking
state with the nature of the exciting cause; but it also arises from the
normal images and illusions of dreams, and from the morbid
hallucinations of madness, both subjectively in the case of the person
affected by them, and objectively for those who observe the extrinsic
effects in gesture and speech, and the whole bearing of the sufferer.

Every one must admit that all these phenomena, and the beliefs which
arise from them, must tend to make the observation of psychical life
more easy, just as morbid psychical phenomena often explain the natural
action of such life under normal conditions. These phenomena, so closely
connected with physiological disturbances which are beyond the control
of our personal will, will inform us of the biological relations between
consciousness and thought on the one side, and our organism on the
other.

The mythical faculty, as we shall see in the following chapters,
combined with physiological excitements, both normal and abnormal,
generally assumes constant forms in the various and manifold world of
its creation; constant forms which conversely also reveal those of the
scientific faculty. In this way the development, composition, and