positive teaching, I must observe that for those who belong to the
historical and evolutionary school, _a priori_, so far as respects any
organism, habit, and psychological constitution in the whole animal
kingdom, in which man is also included, signifies whatever in them is
fixed and permanently organized; whatever is perpetuated by the
indefinite repetition of habits, organs, and functions, by means of the
heredity of ages. The whole history of organisms abounds with positive
and repeated proofs of this fact, which no one can doubt who is not
absolutely ignorant of elementary science. Every day adds to the number
of these proofs, demonstrating one of those truths which become the
common property of nations.

_A priori_ is therefore reduced by us to the modification of organs in
their physical and psychical constitution, as it has ultimately taken
place in the organism by the successive evolutions of forms which have
gradually become permanent, and are perpetuated by embryogenic
reproduction. This reproduction is in its turn the absolute condition of
psychical and organic facts, which are thus manifested as primitive
facts in the new life of the individual. By this law, the psychical
facts, whether elementary or complex, as they occur in the individual up
to the point of their evolution, have the necessary conditions of
possibility, and may therefore be termed a _priori_ with respect to the
laws of evolution, and to the hereditary permanence of acts performed in
the former environment of the organism at the time when they appeared.

This conception of a _priori_ is, it must be admitted, very different
from that of transcendental philosophers, who seek to prove either that
an independent artificer has not only produced the various organic forms
in their present complexity, and has specially provided the spiritual
subject with its category of thought, independently of all experience;
or else they assert the intrinsic existence of such forms in the spirit,
from the beginning of time.

In this way, as we have already said, we must not only collect the facts
which abound in history and ethnology respecting the general teaching of
myths, but we must also observe introspectively, and by pursuing the
experimental method, the primitive and fundamental psychical facts, so
as to discover the a priori conditions of the myth itself. We must
ascertain, from a careful psychological examination, the absolutely
primitive origin of al