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.
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.