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,
as well as the psychical image which corresponds to them, is not content
with this normal and fugitive effect of apprehending the personified
object presented to him. The psychical image of his actual perception,
which he has ascertained from experience to be beneficent or malignant,
or which has been interpreted as such by his fancy, recurs to the mind
even when it is absent and remote, and it recurs in the vivid and
personified form in which it was first perceived.

Hence come the following psychical facts. On the one side the actual
object which he has assumed to be invested with the faculty of will
still remains to exert the same external influence; on the other, its
personified image is also present to his mind, so that he can regard it
with the vivid quickness of the fancy, and invest it, by its manifold
relations to other and various phenomena, with efficacy, force, and
mysterious purposes. It follows from this inward action and emotion that
while in the case of animals the beneficent or malignant object is only
invested with life at the moment of perception, and has no more efficacy
after its disappearance, man on the contrary retains the same
personified object in his memory, and recalls it at plea