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."
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.
Nor could it be otherwise. The internal activity and intrinsic sense of conscious and deliberate life which inspires animals and men, while the latter are still ignorant of the rational order of things, is necessarily reflected both in the external objects of perception and in the internal emotions, as if they were operating causes independent of the will of the percipient. It is impossible for an animal, which is unable by voluntary observation to make, any analytic distinction between the subject and the object, and their respective effects, to consider such phenomena as mechanical entities, subject to necessary and eternal laws. The animal therefore accepts the idea suggested by his spontaneous and subjective nature, that these phenomena are alive. Grass, fruits, plants, water, the movement of material bodies, ordinary and extraordinary meteors, all are implicitly apprehended by him as subjects endowed with will and purpose after the manner of mankind. Nor can the living subjectivity of the phenomenon ever be gauged by the animal in whom the deliberate power of reflection is wanting. His life is consequently passed in a world of living subjects, not of phenomena and laws which mechanically act together; it is, so to speak, a permanent _metaphor_.