Since the types vary very much, and are indeed unstable from their very nature, constantly becoming formed and again decomposed, the primitive mythologies of all people are in like manner very various, indefinite, and subject to constant change.
It appears in the Vedic mythology, and also in that of the ancient Greeks and Latins, how often the typical myths of Agni, Varuna, Indra, Asvini, and Maruti; and again, of Zeus, Here, Athene, and the rest, are changed and reconstituted. This shows how the same human faculty, the same elements which constitute the perception and primitive personification of external phenomena, are those also of the specific and intrinsic phenomena. Just as man, in the primitive conditions of his existence, by the psychical and physiological law of his perception, which he has in common with animals, transformed the world and its phenomena into subjects endowed with conscious life; so by his psychical faculty of reduplication he personified the mental images of these same subjects as fetishes and myths; and subsequently invested them with more distinctly human forms, and also with specific types of humanity. The same faculty and conditions of animal perception afterwards become the true and only causes of the superstitions, mythologies, and religions of mankind. The law of continuity is unbroken, and this is a certain confirmation of the truth.
This faculty, inward function, and process of mythical and symbolic facts led in course of time to the evolution and beginning of knowledge, which is first empirical and then rational. Therefore, we must repeat, the extrinsic and intrinsic perception, the specification of types, and their modification into a unity which was always becoming more comprehensive, are the conditions and method of science itself, which is only developed by means of this faculty. Hence the elements and intrinsic logical form of science are identical with those through which mythical representations and the inward life of the human intelligence are developed.[25]
Besides, as we have before remarked, the empirical knowledge of things begins and is perfected in the superstitions of fetishes and myths. Ideas are modified and become purer as they converge into types, and the principle and method at once become more rational. Either in the faculty of perception and in its elements, or in the inward classification of specific forms, or again in the more perfect empirical knowledge of phenomena, the progress of myth and science go on together, and they are not only developed in a parallel direction, but the form becomes the covering, involucre, matrix, or, as I might say, the _cotyledons_, by means of which the latter is developed and nourished. Even in more rational science this faculty, and these elements, necessarily recur, since in every human conception we find the material aspect, or its mental image, the thing and its cause, and, as we shall see, some mythical personality is insensibly identified with it.