SOURCE: "Cassirer on Mythological Thinking," in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, edited by Paul Arthur Schlipp, The Library of Living Philosophers, Inc., 1949, pp. 359-77.

In the following essay, Montagu explains Cassirer's views on mythological thinking, especially as it relates to preliterate societies.

In Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (1910) we learn that the study arose out of the attempt to comprehend the fundamental conceptions of mathematics from the point of view of logic. Cassirer found that it became necessary to analyze and trace back the fundamental presuppositions of the nature of a concept itself. This led to a renewed analysis of the principles of concepts in general.

In the course of his analysis of the special sciences it became evident that the systematic structure of the exact sciences assumes different forms according to the different logical perspectives in which they are regarded. Hence the necessity of the analysis of the forms...