In addition to these spontaneous and anthropomorphic myths, which serve for the fanciful explanation of the system of the world, and the moral ideas of social and individual life, other myths arise which are not anthropomorphic, but which ascribe a substantial existence to abstract conceptions of physical, moral, or intellectual matters; conceptions necessary for the formulation of human speech.  For although primitive languages, of which we have some examples remaining in the language of savage peoples, are almost inconceivably concrete, yet speech is impossible without expressions of form, or abstract conceptions which are moulded and adapted to that intuition of the relations of things which is always taking place in the mind.[27] The mythical human form does not indeed appear in these conceptions, but a substantial entity is involved in them which sometimes, as we have seen, may even assume the aspect of a complete myth.

A careful analysis of the process of our intelligence has shown that this habitual personification of the phenomenon or abstract conception is due to the innate faculty of perception, since the appearance of any phenomenon necessarily produces the idea of a subject actuated by deliberate purpose; this law is equally constant in the case of animals, in whom, however, it does not issue in a rational conception.  The objection of ourselves into nature, the personification of its phenomena and myths in general, are common to all, while they take a more fanciful form in the case of primitive man; they are the constant and necessary result of the perception of external and internal phenomena.  This personification includes moral and intellectual as well as physical phenomena, and it always proceeds in the same way, from special phenomena to specific types, and hence to abstract perceptions.

In this way we have established the important fact that the primitive personification of every external or internal phenomenon, the origin of all myths, religions, and superstitions, is accomplished by the same necessary psychical and physical law as that which produces sensation.  That is, men, as well as animals, begin by thinking and feeling in a mythical way, owing to the intrinsic constitution of their intellectual life; and while animals never emerge from these psychical conditions, men are gradually emancipated from them, as they become able to think more rationally, thus finding redemption, truth, and liberty by means of science.

We now propose to unite in a single conception this necessity of our intellect, at once the product and the cause of perception, and of the spontaneous vivification of phenomena; since the law may be expressed in a compendious form.