the most barbarous peoples, in the most
concrete and dissimilar languages, since without them any language would
be impossible.

The same intrinsic and innate necessity which, both in man and animals,
automatically effects the animation and personification of consciousness
and will in the case of external objects and phenomena, also impels man
to vivify and personify the specific types which he has gradually
formed, and they take an objective place in his memory as the objects of
nature do in the case of animals. In this way man does not, like
animals, merely vivify the special oak or chestnut tree presented to him
in a concrete form at a given moment, but he vivifies in the same way
the psychical type of trees, of flowers, etc., which has been evolved in
his mind, just as he vivifies the type of suffering, of disease, of
death, of healing, or of any other force.

For this reason the process of necessary and spontaneous personification
is at first two-fold; namely, the personification of individual and
external objects and phenomena, and that of their specific inward types,
whether of the objects themselves or of their sensations and emotions.
It must be observed that at this early stage of man's history, specific
types, or the classification of things, were not ordered and determined
with scientific precision; they were undefined and confused, running
more or less into each other, so as to be easily lost, or constantly
diverging more widely. This internal movement of images and undefined
conceptions was a stimulus to active and mobile life, and an abundant
source of vivid or obscure myths, and of the sentiments corresponding to
them.

These specific primordial types were openly referred to external
phenomena, and were based upon the life of nature, since rational or
scientific ideas had not yet made their appearance, or only very
sparsely. In any case, the reality of these types and their animation
are facts, as all the earliest records attest, whether among civilized
or savage races.

The personification of specific types, which are in general the most
obvious--those, namely, which refer to animals, vegetables, minerals,
and meteors, things useful or injurious to man--is the origin of the
subsequent belief in fetishes, genii, demons, and spirits, and these led
to the vivification of the whole of nature, her laws, customs, and
forces. Man's personification of himself, his projection of himself as a
living being in