The interpretation of the lightning as a red bird, and of
drowning as the work of a smiling but treacherous fiend, are
parts of that primitive philosophy of nature in which all
forces objectively existing are conceived as identical with
the force subjectively known as volition. It is this
philosophy, currently known as fetichism, but treated by Mr.
Tylor under the somewhat more comprehensive name of "animism,"
which we must now consider in a few of its most conspicuous
exemplifications. When we have properly characterized some of
the processes which the untrained mind habitually goes
through, we shall have incidentally arrived at a fair solution
of the genesis of mythology.
Let us first note the ease with which the barbaric or
uncultivated mind reaches all manner of apparently fanciful
conclusions through reckless reasoning from analogy. It is
through the operation of certain laws of ideal association
that all human thinking, that of the highest as well as that
of the lowest minds, is conducted: the discovery of the law
of gravitation, as well as the invention of such a
superstition as the Hand of Glory, is at bottom but a case of
association of ideas. The difference between the scientific
and the mythologic inference consists solely in the number of
checks which in the former case combine to prevent any other
than the true conclusion from being framed into a proposition
to which the mind assents.
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