brought their intellectual, and consequently their
moral sense to perfection, are enabled to understand this natural order
of laws and social facts, divested of extrinsic mythical beliefs, they
will find in it so much reciprocal benefit, and will have such a deep
sense of their personal dignity, since they are intellectually their own
artificers, that they will be able to understand how the highest good
has ensued and will ensue from the sacrifices or achievements made by a
few for the benefit of all. We are undoubtedly still a long way from
such happy conditions, either socially or as individuals, but every day
brings them nearer, and it is to this end that our civilization plainly
tends, in spite of all the complaints, the fears, and sometimes even the
malevolence of men.

As I have already said, the study of the beginnings and of, the
anthropological conditions of the various myths is necessary to enable
us to understand their psychical phenomena, together with the hidden
laws of the exercise of thought. The learned and illustrious Ribot has
justly said that psychology, dissociated from physiology and cognate
sciences, is extinct, and that in order to bring it to life it is
necessary to follow the progress and methods of all other contemporary
sciences.[7] The genesis of myth, its development, the specification and
integration of its beliefs, as well as the several intrinsic and
extrinsic sources whence it proceeds, will assign to it a clearer place
among the obscure recesses of psychical facts; they will reveal to us
the connection between the facts of consciousness and their antecedents,
between the world and our normal and abnormal physiological conditions;
they will show what a complex drama is performed by the action and
reaction between ourselves and the things within us, and also will
declare the nature of the laws which govern the various and manifold
creation of forms, imaginations, and ideas, and the artificial world of
phantasms derived from these. In this way myth will appear to be not
merely due to the direct animation of things, varying in our waking
state with the nature of the exciting cause; but it also arises from the
normal images and illusions of dreams, and from the morbid
hallucinations of madness, both subjectively in the case of the person
affected by them, and objectively for those who observe the extrinsic
effects in gesture and speech, and the whole bearing of the sufferer.

Every one mus