sed to be produced by fetishism,
properly so called. For if the dog were frightened and agitated by the
movement of the umbrella, or ran away, as Herbert Spencer tells us, from
the stick which had hurt him while he was playing with it, it was
because an unusual movement or pain produced by an object to which habit
had rendered him indifferent, aroused in the animal the congenital sense
of the intentional subjectivity of phenomena, and this is really the
first stage of myth, and not of its subsequent form of fetishism.

I must therefore repeat that the first form of myth which spontaneously
arises in man as an animal, is the vague but intentional subjectivity of
the phenomena presented to his senses. This subjectivity is sometimes
quiescent and implicit, and sometimes active, in which case it may
arouse the fear of evil, or the hope of physical pleasures.

As in man the reflex power slowly and gradually grows--although at first
in an exclusively empirical form--so he slowly and gradually accepts the
first form of fetishism, which consists in the permanent and fixed
individuation of a phenomenon or object of nature, as a power which he
reflectively believes to be the artificer of good or evil.

In this stage it is no longer the phenomenon actually present which
arouses the apprehension of an intentional subjectivity, while its image
and efficacy disappear with the sensible object; the phenomenon, or the
inanimate or animate form, is reflectively retained by the memory, in
which it appears as a malignant or benignant power. In a word, the first
stage of fetishism, which is the second form of the evolution of myth,
is the universal and primitive sense of myth in nature, which man alone
is capable of applying permanently to some given phenomenon, such as
wind, rain, and the like, or lakes, volcanoes, and rocks, and these
remain fixed in the mind as powers of good or evil. In the earlier stage
of myth the scene is constantly changing, while in the latter, certain
objects or phenomena remain fixed in the memory, exciting the same
emotions whether they are present or absent, and to this consciousness
we may trace the dawn of worship.

Ethnography affords plain proofs of the fetishism which preceded the
civilization of many peoples, and among those which still remain in the
stage of fetishism we can trace the primitive form of a vague
impersonation of natural objects and phenomena.[28]

As we have already seen, every animal