In fact, in this stage man does not merely infuse his spiritual essence
into these types, but likewise his corporeal form, whence we have the
true, human image of myth. This may be seen in the various primitive
Olympuses of all historic races as well as among savage peoples, only
varying in the splendour of their imagery. They consist in the
transformation of the earlier fetish into an intelligent, corporeal
person, and result from the formation and personification of types.

Beginning with the mysterious conception of some particular spring as a
malignant or beneficent fetish which, although personified, still
retains its concrete form, the classifying action of the intelligence
gradually constructs, from its points of resemblance to other springs, a
generic type which includes them all. This typical conception,
personified in its turn, next represents a unique power, of which all
the individual and accidental springs are only manifestations. Thus it
is clear that man, in the personification of this type or specific
conception, is no longer bound to the actual form of the special object
which first represented it, but he may be said to mould a more
indefinite and plastic substance into which he can with spontaneous or
facile art incarnate his whole person. Hence this substance will assume
an anthropomorphic form, and will issue, not in a mysterious being of
extrinsic and indefinite form, but in a person with human features,
obvious to human senses.

It was thus, when the fetish attained to a specific type, that mythical
anthropomorphism was generated, and polytheism, properly so-called; a
polytheism which represents in its figures and images the humanization
and personification of specific types. These afterwards diverge into
specifications which vary with the number of phenomena that are united