Page:Mythology Among the Hebrews.djvu/80

40 §2. It is easy to see that the first step in the formation of myths could not be a short and quickly passing stage. If it were so, the appellations of physical phenomena could not have become so firmly established as to prolong their existence even after a great majority of them had become linguistically meaningless, and to become objects of mythical transformation. The psychological process which brought about the identification of an object with itself must therefore have taken place late in the development of the human mind. Men had already expressed most various notions of the phenomena of nature and observed them in many phases, long before they attained to the power of identifying one such repeatedly occurring phenomenon with itself, notwithstanding the regularity of its appearance.

One other psychological consideration, however, demands our attention here—one among many; for a systematic presentation of all the psychological forces with which we have to reckon in investigating myths and the history of their growth belongs to a Philosophy of Mythology, which it is not our intention to give here.

Among the various categories, that of Space is the earliest to become an object of consciousness to the human soul, both in the genetic development of the individual mind and in that of the human race. The attachment of a notion to space is the earliest developed; indeed the notion of a thing without the notion of space is impossible. Even beasts distinguish things by their space. Hence L. Geiger correctly said that Language, the origin of which also marks the first phase of the power of thought, 'springs from' the organ of the discrimination of space, 'the Eye and Light.' With the category of Time it is otherwise. The discrimination of things in time is unfolded relatively later; it postulates a more delicate degree of observation. The notion of Space emanates from that sense, the use of which man acquires the earliest and the most easily of all except that of touch—the sense