based cannot be regarded as less
than a poetic fancy or an ill-understood metaphor; they depend on a vast
philosophy of nature, certainly rude and primitive, but coherent and
serious.

The second operation of the mind, inseparable, as we have said, from the
first, attributes to these imaginary beings various qualities, but all
important to man. They are good or bad, useful or hurtful, weak or
powerful, kind or cruel. One remains stupefied before the swarming of
these numberless genii whom no natural phenomenon, no act of life, no
form of sickness escapes, and these beliefs remain unbroken even among
the tribes that are in contact with old civilizations.[53] Primitive man
lives and moves among the ceaseless phantoms of his own imagination.[54]

Lastly, the psychological mechanism of the creative moment is very
simple. It depends on a single factor previously studied--thinking by
analogy. It is a matter first of all--and this is important--of
conceiving beings analogous to ourselves, cast in our mould, cut after
our pattern; that is, feeling and acting; then qualifying them and
determining them according to the attributes of our own nature. But the
logic of images, very different from that of reason, concludes an
objective resemblance; it regards as alike, what seem alike; it
attributes to an internal linking of images, the validity of an
objective connection between things. Whence arises the discord between
the imagined world and the world of reality. "Analogies that for us are
only fancies were for the man of past ages real" (Tylor).

b. In the genesis of myths, the second moment is that of fanciful
invention. Entities take form; they have a history and adventures: they
become the stuff for a romance. People of poor and dry imagination do
not reach the second period. Thus, the religion of the Romans peopled
the universe with an innumerable quantity of genii. No object, no act,
no detail, but had its own presiding genius. There was one for
germinating grain, for sprouting grain, for grain in flower, for
blighted grain; for the door, its hinges, its lock, etc. There was a
myriad of misty, formless entities. This is animism arrested at its
first stage; abstraction has killed imagination.

Who created those legends and tales of adventure constituting the
subject-matter of mythology? Probably inspired individuals, priests or
prophets. They came perhaps from dreams, hallucinations, insane
attacks--they are derived from s