The motive or subject of myth may be external, cosmic, or it may be
internal, intellectual, and moral, but in each case the cause and
faculty at work are the same. Just as the primary condition of
observation, and consequently the motive principle of science, consists
in the primitive exercise of the intelligence, which leads to empirical
and rational knowledge, so myth and science have a common origin in the
immediate transformation of natural objects and phenomena into living
subjects, and they flow from the same deep source. The object in view is
different, but their constructive faculty is the same, and they are, up
to a certain point in their long historic course, evolved in the same
way. Science, therefore, from one point of view, is the gradual
exhaustion and dissolution of myth into the objects which are
scientifically investigated, and this will appear more clearly in the
sequel.

The series of various phenomena, whether of light, of meteors, of water,
of vegetable and animal forms, which were the first subjects of myths,
became so interwoven as finally to be represented in an anthropomorphic
personality, and were thus gradually lost and evaporated in the ideal
symbol. As time went on, by the exercise of the intelligence, and by the
aid of the observations and collateral experiments naturally connected
with them, man ended where he had begun; released from myth, he only
recognized the facts and laws of the world. This clearly shows, not only
the formation of myths, but the process of evolution by which they pass
into science, in which they find their termination.

If, however, myth and science have the same origin, and start from a
common fact, a fundamental principle is necessary, and an internal human
act, which is at once the cause and genesis both of myth and science.