ersonality, and only the phonetic notation five remained, which
no longer recalls a hand, the origin of the several numerals, nor words
connected with it. It is now a mere sign, apart from any rational idea.
The same may be said of the other numerals.

We give these few examples, which apply to all words, since they all
follow the same course, beginning with the real and primitive image,
subjectively effecting their peculiar meaning. Hence we see how the
intrinsic law of myth is evolved in every human act in diverse ways, but
always with the same results.

In fact, before articulate speech, for which man was adapted by his
organs and physiological conditions, was formulated into words for
things and words for shape, man like animals thought in images; he
associated and dissociated, he composed and decomposed, he moved and
removed images, which sufficed for all individual and immediate
operations of his mind. The relations of things were felt, or rather
seen through his inward representation of them as in a picture,
expressing in a material form the respective positions of figures and
objects which, since they are remote from him, can only be expressed by
such words as _nearer, lower_ or _higher, faint_ or _clear_, by more
vivid or paler tints, such as we see in a running stream, in the forms
of clouds, in the reciprocal relations of all objects represented in
painting.

In order to understand the primeval process of thought by means of
images, it is necessary to conceive such a picture as living and mobile,
and constantly forming a fresh combination of parts. Animals have not,
and primeval man had not, the phonetic signs or words which give an
individual character to the images, and so represent them that by
combining these images in an articulate form, thought may be
represented by signs; and in and through these a universal and objective
mode of exercising the intellectual faculty of reasoning has been
created.

Speech can, by means of reflex memory, produce at will the particular
images already classified in the mind, and this makes the process of
reasoning possible; since such a process becomes more easy by the use of
signs to which the attention can revert. The relative size of objects,
and the like qualities, which are at first regarded as so many different
intuitions in space, are defined by words or gestures, and are thus
subjected to comparative analogy; but in the early stages of language
these relations