ind to _entify (entificare)_ every object of our
perception, emotion, or consciousness. If any one should object to this
neologism, in spite of its adequate expression of the original function
of the intelligence, we reply that the use and necessity of the verb
_identify_ have been accepted in the neo-Latin tongues, and therefore
_entify_, which has the same root and form, can hardly be rejected,
since it, like the former, signifies an actual process of thought. We
therefore adopt the word without scruple, since new words have often
been coined before when they were required to express new conceptions
and theories.

The primitive and constant act of all animals, including man, when
external or internal sensation has opened to them the immense field of
nature, is that of _entifying_ the object of sensation, or, in a word,
all phenomena. Such _entification_ is the result of spontaneous
necessity, by the law of the intrinsic faculty of perception; it is not
the result of reflection, but it is immediate, innate, and inevitable.
It is an eternal law of the evolution of the intelligence, like all
those which rule the order of the world.

We do not only proclaim in this fact a law of psychological importance,
but also the origin of myths, and in a certain sense of science, since
myth is developed by the same methods as science. These two streams flow
from one and the same source, since the _entification_ of phenomena is
proper both to myth and science; the former _entifies_ sensations, and
the latter ideas, since science by reversion to law and rational
conception finally attains to the primitive entity. And finally, if an
imaginative idea of a cause is active in myth from the first, the
conception of a cause is equally necessary to science. It is her
business to explain the reason of things, and in what they rationally
consist:

"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas."

CHAPTER VII.

THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF MYTH AND SCIENCE.

In the foregoing pages we have reached the primordial fact of our
psychical and physical nature, in which, as it appears to us, both myth
and science have their origin. After first considering the animal
kingdom as a whole, we have seen that the interaction between external
phenomena and the consciousness of an organism results in the
spontaneous vivification of the phenomenon in question, so that the
origin of the mythical representation of nature is found in the innate
faculty