anity
transformed into the earlier fetishes and pagan myths; the saints are
merely substituted for the gods and demi-gods, for the deities of
groves, of the sea and of war, as they are found in ancient mythology.
The legends of the saints and of Christ himself are grafted on similar
legends of the ancient religions of Greece and Rome, and Paradise has
assumed the appearance and form of Olympus. The paintings still extant
in the catacombs of Rome, which mark the transformation of the old into
the new religion, speak plainly enough by their symbols and figures.

Myth is logically identical with the scientific process in its intrinsic
character; starting from a vague subjectivity which gradually assumes a
human shape, the first intellectual vitality is lost, unless it is
revived by a higher impulse. Science, on the other hand, which begins in
myth, gradually divests this subjectivity of its anthropomorphic
character, until pure reason is attained, and with this the power of
indefinite progress.

The theory which has hitherto been generally accepted by mythologists,
even by those who profess Comte's great principle of historical
evolution, is that man began with special fetishes, that these were
combined in comprehensive types to form polytheistic hierarchies, and
hence he rose by an analogous process to a more or less vague conception
of monotheism.

This theory, true as to the principal forms which myth successively
assumes, is not accurate with respect to the stages of development, and
it is also erroneous in some particulars of the actual history of the
various mythologies of different peoples.

In the early chapters of this work we have briefly touched on such a
development, and the reader must pardon us for returning to the subject,
now that we have to give an historical account of the process of
evolution. In fact, the fetish, in the general sense of the term, is not
the first form of myth which is revealed in the dawn of human life. In
order to estimate its positive value, it is necessary to analyze such a
conception with greater accuracy, and then to verify it historically
with the help of the science of ethnology.

The first manifestations of mythical ideas must be considered in man as
an animal; that is, as the result of his spontaneous intercourse with
the world, independently of the psychical faculty peculiar to himself,
after he had acquired by subsequent evolution of mind and body the
faculty and habit