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It is manifest in Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling, nor is it difficult to trace it in the latest and artificial theories of the schools of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. In all these cases the entification of logical conceptions is evident; in all there is an arbitrary personification of a conception or of a fundamental Idea.
As the innate impulse led to the entification of speech and of the singing of men and animals, so it also led to the mythical personification of dancing and instrumental music, in which nearly all peoples have recognized a demoniac and deliberate power.
At the same time, for the great majority of peoples in early and subsequent ages down to our own time, there was and is the consciousness of a numen, in the proper meaning of the word, within the statue or effigy, and these were unconsciously entified by the same law which leads to the entification of natural phenomena; the august presence of the gods and an artificial symbol of the living organism of the world were contained in the material form.
In this vast Pythagorean scheme, which contrasts with that of the Ionic school of physics, thought is more explicitly freed from the ruder mythical ideas, and rises to a more intelligent and rational conception of the world, but the ancient popular traditions still persist, and there is an evident entification of number.
In virtue of the faculty of entification, only the mind and its ideas were real, the world and all which it contained had a doubtful existence. This tendency had its ultimate expression in Fichte, who created the universe by means of the Ego, thus transforming the earlier objective myth into one which was wonderfully subjective.
Such entification is the result of spontaneous necessity, by the law of the intrinsic faculty of perception; it is not the result of reflection, but it is immediate, innate, and inevitable. It is an eternal law of the evolution of the intelligence, like all those which rule the order of the world.
For in the case of mythical entification the tendency to impersonation was always increasing and becoming more distinctly zoomorphic and anthropomorphic, and in this form it was crystallized or mummified, while science on the other hand was always enlarging its sphere and dissipating the first mythical form of its conception, until nothing was left but a purely rational idea.
Such an objection of images or sensations, considered in the act which transforms them into a reality, depends on the same cause as all other acts of perception; there is always an entification of the phenomenon, which in this case is a vivid internal image, appearing to be external and real.
Owing to the primordial and innate necessity which it is so difficult to overcome, science itself still nourishes myths within its pale, although unconsciously and in their most rational form. Within our own recollection the imponderable was a tenet of physics, and this was indeed, in spite of all the enlightenment of science, a mythical entification of forces.
But since these psychical and physiological conditions lose their force when the habit and actions of our waking state are dormant, the primitive and innate entification of the image quickly recurs, as we can plainly see from the previous analysis.
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