observation, in order to arrive at types, laws, and ultimate unity, or
at least a unity supposed to be ultimate, to which everything is
reduced. So that the mythical faculty of thought was scientific in its
logical form, and was exercised in the same way as the scientific
faculty.

But science does not merely consist in the systematic arrangement of
facts in which it begins, nor in their combination into general and
comprehensive laws; the sequence of causes and effects must also be
understood, and it is not enough to classify the fact without explaining
its genesis and cause. We have seen that the innate faculty of
perception involved the idea of a cause in the supposition that the
phenomenon was actuated by a subject, and while thought classified
fetishes and idols in a mythical way, an inherent power for good or evil
was ascribed to them, not only in their relation to man, but in their
effects on nature. What Vico has called "the poetry of physics"
consisted in the explanation of natural phenomena by the efficacy of
mythical and supernatural agents. From this point of view again, myth
and science pursue identically the same method and the same general form
of cognition.

Nor is this all. Science is, in fact, the _de-personification_ of myth,
arriving at a rational idea of that which was originally a fantastic
type by divesting it of its wrappings and symbols. In the natural
evolution of myth, man passes from the extrinsic mythical substance to
the intrinsic ideal by the same intellectual process, and when the types
have become ideas, he carries on intrinsically the _entifying_ process
which he first applied to the material and external phenomena.

In this case also the process is gradual; by attempting a more rational
explanation of physical phenomena, man attains to ultimate conceptions
which express direct cosmic laws, and he regards these laws as
substantial entities, which in their originally polytheistic form were
the gods who directed all things. Here the scientific myth really
begins, since natural forces and phenomena are no longer personified in
anthropomorphic beings; but the laws or general principles of physics
are transformed into material subjects, which are still analogous to
human consciousness and tendencies, although the idolatrous
anthropomorphism has disappeared.

The combination of myth and science in the human mind does not stop
here, since, as I have said, it goes on to form ideal represent