ate purpose of influencing them.

The faculty and elements of apprehension are precisely similar in man
and animals, since extrinsic things present the same appearance to both
alike, and the perceptive power acts in the same way. We cannot, indeed,
go back to our first beginnings, and it is difficult for those who are
not accustomed to such researches to discover the primitive facts of
their own being, which have been so much modified by exercise and the
intrinsic use of reflection for many ages; yet some certain signs
remain, nor would it be now impossible to reproduce them. No one can
doubt that man also began to communicate with the world and with himself
by his perception of a phenomenon, of some extrinsic quality or form.
From this he directly apprehended the thing and its cause. No
intelligent person can believe that man had any direct intuition of the
thing in itself, independently of the extrinsic phenomenon by which it
was presented to his perceptions: he could not by the sudden
apprehension of all natural objects intuitively grasp the _Idea_. This
will be more fully shown in the following chapter.

In accordance with this statement, man, who still retains his animal
nature, has exercised the same faculty of apprehension by the synthetic
process of the three elements which compose it in the case of animals;
he attains therefore to the same results, that is, he animates the
object of perception, and considers it as an efficient cause. This
identical faculty of perception in man and animals was only
differentiated when the reflex power of man subsequently enabled him to
regard objects, as we do now, as inanimate, and subject to the universal
laws of nature.

Even now, after all our scientific attainments, we are not wholly free
from the former innate illusion; we often act towards things as if we
lived in the early days of our race, and continue that primitive process
of personification in the case of certain objects.

We have shown what was the origin of the fetish and of myth, and how it
arose from the impersonation of all natural objects and phenomena, which
are transformed into living subjects. This shows that the faculty,
elements, and results of the apprehension are identical in man and
animals. If man created the fetish which in process of differentiation
generated all kinds of myths, he, like animals, was directly and
implicitly conscious of the living subject, and in it of an active
cause. Although i