Both in physical, moral, and intellectual myths, and in the substantial entity infused into abstract conceptions, the external or internal phenomenon immediately generates the idea of a subject, since it is a fundamental law of our mind 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 of animal perception.