, as we hope,
demonstrated the origin and genesis of myth in general, an origin and
genesis which had their first impulses and causes in the animal kingdom
as a whole, since these beginnings were the necessary result of the
psychical exercise of the perception and intelligence. We next
discovered in man, as he issued from a simply animal condition and
attained the power of reflection, the origin of the special myth or
fetish, which was a higher evolution of that which is proper to animals;
hence the origin of the specific myth was altogether anthropomorphic,
whether physical or moral; and hence came also the development and
ramification of all mythologies, and of universal polytheism.

It may be seen from the reality and truth of this theory how much
mistaken those men are who hold, owing to their religious prejudices or
to their systems of logic and history, that monotheism was the first
intuition of man, or at any rate of the privileged races. This is
altogether impossible, since such an opinion is opposed to the genuine
development of the intelligence, to its primitive constitution and
progress, and to the essential _solidarity_ of human and animal nature.

In the case of animals as well as of man the implicit act and psychical
process of communication between the world and themselves consist in the
individual and concrete animation of the thing or phenomenon perceived;
whence they are resolved into conscious subjects, acting with a given
purpose; the difference in man's case, due to his power of reflection,
consists in the fact that he ascribes to the fetish distinct mental
characteristics, regarding it as a subject, actuated by will, and
invested with an external form. Hence it is impossible that man should
have had any primitive intuition of a perfectly rational and universal
_Idea_, since his intelligence is so constituted that it is slowly
developed from the animal condition into a humanity which is mythically
reflex, and he rises from the single to the specific, from phenomena to
the type which more or less exactly corresponds to them.

We are convinced that by these researches, we have eradicated the
previous misconception, which cannot be revived or maintained except
with the weapons of sophism, and by defying evidence and the very nature
of things.

While man has risen from the individual myth to that which is specific,
infusing anthropomorphic life into the whole of nature, and into his own
sensations,