reverse (_sinistra,
destra_),[24] and a mountain is gigantic ox dwarfish.

In like manner we ascribe our own functions to nature. The river eats
into the land; the whirlpool swallows all which is thrown into it, and
the wind whistles, howls and moans; the torrent murmurs, the sun is born
and dies, the heavens frown, the fields smile. This habit is also
transferred to moral questions; and we speak of the heart of the
question, the leading idea, the body of doctrines, the members of a
philosophic system; we infuse new blood into thought. Truth becomes
palpable, a theme is eviscerated, thought is lame, science is childish.
History speaks clearly; there is an embryo of knowledge, a vacillating
science; the infancy, youth, maturity, and death of a theory; morality
is crass, the spirit meagre or acute; the mind adapts itself, logic is
maimed; there is a conflict of ideas, the inspiration of science,
truncated thoughts. Again we talk of the head of the mob, of the foot of
the altar or the throne, of the heart of the riot, of the body of an
army, of a phalanx, of trampling under foot, duty, decency, and justice.

From these examples, and indeed we might say from the whole of speech,
especially if we go back to the primitive value of words and to their
roots, it appears to what a vast extent man originally projected
himself, his consciousness, emotions, and purposes into inanimate
things; and how, even under the historical conditions of civilization,
he still personifies the world, and ascribes to it the forms of his own
body and limbs.

Again, we have plainly shown that man, by the intrinsic reduplication of
his psychical faculty, spontaneously retains and personifies the inward
phantasm generated by such a projection of special natural objects on
his perception. In the genesis of such fetishes, and also when, by an
effort of will, he recalls them to his mind, this faculty with its
constituent elements is brought into action. In fact, when the image is
recalled to the mind, it is represented like the external phenomenon;
and consequently it involves and generates the thing of which the
phenomenon is the external vest, that is, its causative power; and in
this way the objective process of its formation is inwardly reproduced.
Since the cosmic reality is thus ideally reproduced, the inward
substance of the fetish assumes a really efficacious power, whether in
its extrinsic form, or in its intrinsic image, and in this way primi