ed to the instruments of a powerful material civilization, invigorate
its strength and presage its indefinite duration in forms we are not
able to foresee, unless indeed fatal astral or telluric catastrophes
should hinder its progress or bring it to an end.

If we compare this race with itself at different epochs, and in the many
different peoples into which it was severed, and if at the same time we
confront it with the types of other peoples at various stages, from the
rudest to the most civilized, it becomes possible to form a clear
conception of the genesis and successive evolution of myth and science
of which the human race is capable, and in this way we may understand
the general law which governs such evolutions. This study also teaches
us that humanity, whether we agree with monogenists or poligenists, is
physically and psychically in all respects the same in its essential
elements; in all peoples without distinction, as ethnography teaches us,
the origin and genesis of myth, the implicit exercise of reason and its
development, are, at all events up to a given point, absolutely
identical. All start from the same manifestations and mythical
creations, and these are afterwards developed according to the logical
or scientific canons of thought, which are applied to their
classification. Both among fetish-worshippers and polytheists there was
a tendency towards monotheism, although sometimes it could only be
discerned in a vague and confused manner.

If myth is, as I have said, to be considered from another point of view,
as the spontaneous effect of the intelligence, and a necessary function,
relatively to the primary act from which it begins, it might appear that
myth would never cease to be, and that humanity, even as it is
represented by the elect and enduring race, must always remain in this
original illusion; so that every man would have to begin again for
himself in his own peculiar cycle of myth. But history shows that this
is not the case, and that the mythic faculty gradually wanes and becomes
weaker, even if it does not altogether cease to exist, a result which
would not occur if myth were a necessary function of the intelligence.

I shall presently reply to such an objection; in the meanwhile,
regarding the question superficially, I need only say that if the mythic
faculty diminishes in one direction, and with respect to some forms and
their corresponding substance, it has certainly not ceased to appear