to external things, was the result of reflection. In
fact, the impersonation of the winds took place in very early times,
since they most frequently and universally excited the attention and
anxiety of man and animals, whether beneficially or otherwise, and by
their mechanical action, their whistling and other sounds, they readily
struck the mobile fancy of primitive men, and also of savage and
ignorant peoples in our day.

Just as the act of respiration is a faint wind which goes on whether in
sleep or wakefulness, and only ceases with death, so it was with the
phenomenon of nature which attracted their attention, and it was
invested by them with life. Since the winds of nature had already been
animated and personified by a spontaneous act, so our inmost being was
certainly first considered as material, and impersonated as breath and
air.

This appears from the roots and words of all languages; the Hebrew
_nephesh, nshamah, ruach_--soul or spirit--are all derived from the idea
of breathing. The Greek word [Greek: anemos], the Latin word _animus_,
signify breathing, wind, soul, and spirit. In the Sanscrit _atman_ we
have the successive meanings which show the evolution of the myth:
breathing, vital soul, intelligence, and then the individual, the _ego_.
In Polynesia we find the same process of things. _To think_, which in
the Aryan tongues comes from the root _c'i_, and originally meant to
collect, to comprehend, in German, _begreifen_, becomes in the
Polynesian language, _to talk in the belly_. It is, therefore, an
evident historical fact that man first personified natural phenomena,
and then made use of these personifications to personify his inward
acts, his psychical ideas and conceptions. This was the necessary
process, since animals were prior to man, temporally and logically, and
external idols were formed before those which were internal and peculiar
to himself.[17]

It is true that man unconsciously, that is, without deliberation, not
only animates external things and their specific types, but he also, by
an exercise of memory, animates the psychical image of these special
perceptions. If, for example, the primitive man personifies a stream of
water which he has seen to issue from a fissure of the rocks, and
ascribes to it voluntary and intentional motion, he also animates the
image which reappears in his sphere of thought, and conceives it to
have a real existence. He does not merely believe it to be a psyc