The deliberate intention to be beneficent or malign, useful or
injurious, which is ascribed to any external object, thus transforming
it into an intelligent subject, is the first and simplest stage of myth,
and the innate form of its genesis. In this case, it is always special,
extrinsic, and concrete, and belongs implicitly to the animal kingdom,
although more or less vividly in proportion to the mental and physical
evolution of the species. It is for the same reason also proper to man,
in whose case it first appears in the indefinite multiplication of
fetishes, whatever may be the object venerated, and whatever the form,
aspect, and character ascribed to it. This constitutes the primordial
impulses, both of religious consciousness and of the spontaneous
solution of the problems of the world among all peoples.

While the animation of special objects by animals generates actual
myths, yet it only occurs in the acts of momentary and transient
perception; they are born and die, they arise and are dissolved in the
very act of production, and they neither have nor can have retrospective
or future influence on the animal. The world, its laws and phenomena,
form for him one universal and persistent myth, so far as he feels
himself constrained to vivify and transform them into subjects actuated
by will. This consequently is the constant and normal condition of his
conscious life with relation to things, and it leads to nothing further;
his mental attitude with respect to myth does not vary from his physical
attitude towards the atmosphere, the food and water which nourish and
sustain him, and the exercise of his functions are in conformity with
it, as though it were his natural and necessary element.

Man, on the contrary, since he has acquired the power of reflection,
which enables him to reconsider past intuitions by an effort of memory,