Myth and Science / An Essay

by Tito Vignoli

We have all, however unaccustomed to give account of our acts and functions, found ourselves in circumstances which produced the momentary personification of natural objects. The sight of some extraordinary phenomenon produces a vague sense of some one acting with a given purpose, and hence of an actual fetish. A man will sometimes address the things which surround him, and act towards them as if they possessed consciousness and will. Children, who are still without experience and reflection, will often invest external objects with solidity.

A child, as soon as it can guide its own motions, will grasp anything which is pliant and yielding as firmly as if it were solid, thus implicitly judging the thing from its appearance. In the same way, a child confidently relies on any support, however weak and insufficient it may be, arguing as usual from the appearance to the thing itself. Nor must it be said that experience is necessary to correct these errors. The implicit faculty of apprehension is prior to experience, which only becomes possible by means of this faculty. The elements of this faculty unconsciously fulfil and pursue their office in the child, aided by the reflex motions which are cerebro-spinal and peripheral, as they have been produced and organized in the species by evolution; but they, as well as these reflex physiological motions, are prior to the same temporary experience.[23]

Thus the new-born infant sucks the milk which serves for its nourishment from its mother's breast; it is impossible in this case that such a class of elements should not be spontaneously developed; the child feels the nipple and adapts its mouth and mode of breathing to it, while pressing the breast with its hands to express the milk. If much in this operation might be ascribed to reflex movements, yet in association with them, supplementing and rendering them possible, there is an implicit perception of the external phenomenon through the sense of touch, and he becomes conscious of the object, and of its causative power; such power consisting in this case of its capacity to satisfy his wants. In short, all animals, man included, in every act of communication with the world, exercise this faculty by means of the three elements which constitute it. If we consider the actions of infants, and still more of all young animals, this truth will be vividly displayed.

In common speech, even to this day, all men, both learned and unlearned, speak of inanimate things as if they had consciousness and intelligence. While this mode of expression bears witness to the extremely early origin of the general personification of natural objects, it also shows that even now our intelligence is not emancipated from such a habit, and our speech unconsciously retains the old custom. Thus we call weather good and bad, the wind mad (pazzo) or furious, the sea treacherous, the waters insidious; a stone is obstinate, if we cannot easily move it, and we inveigh against all kinds of material obstacles as if they could hear us. We call the season inconstant or deceitful, the sun melancholy and unwilling to shine, and we say that the sky threatens snow. We say that some plants are consumed by heat, that some soils are indomitable, that well cultivated ground is no longer wild, that in a good season the whole landscape smiles and leaps for joy. A river is called malevolent, and a lake swallows up men; the earth is thirsty and sucks up moisture, and plants fear the cold. The people of Pistoja say that some olive trees will not feel a thrashing, that they are afraid of many things, and that they live on, despising the course of years. Again, they say that olive trees are not afraid of the pruning knife, and that they rejoice in its use by a skilled hand. Thousands of such expressions might be adduced, and we refer our readers to Giuliani's work, "Linguaggio vivente toscano."

Nor do we only ascribe our own feelings to inanimate things, but we also invest them with the forms and members of the human body. We speak of the head, shoulder, back, or foot of a mountain, of an arm of the sea, a tongue of land, the mouth of a sea-port, of a cave, or crater. So again we ascribe teeth to mountains, a front (fronte, forehead) to a house; there is the eye-brow (ciglio) of a ditch, the eye of heaven, a vein of metal, the entrails of a mountain. The Alps are bald or bare, the soil is wrinkled, objects are sinister or the reverse (sinistra, destra),[24] and a mountain is gigantic ox dwarfish.

In like manner we ascribe our own functions to nature. The river eats into the land; the whirlpool swallows all which is thrown into it, and the wind whistles, howls and moans; the torrent murmurs, the sun is born and dies, the heavens frown, the fields smile. This habit is also transferred to moral questions; and we speak of the heart of the question, the leading idea, the body of doctrines, the members of a philosophic system; we infuse new blood into thought. Truth becomes palpable, a theme is eviscerated, thought is lame, science is childish. History speaks clearly; there is an embryo of knowledge, a vacillating science; the infancy, youth, maturity, and death of a theory; morality is crass, the spirit meagre or acute; the mind adapts itself, logic is maimed; there is a conflict of ideas, the inspiration of science, truncated thoughts. Again we talk of the head of the mob, of the foot of the altar or the throne, of the heart of the riot, of the body of an army, of a phalanx, of trampling under foot, duty, decency, and justice.

From these examples, and indeed we might say from the whole of speech, especially if we go back to the primitive value of words and to their roots, it appears to what a vast extent man originally projected himself, his consciousness, emotions, and purposes into inanimate things; and how, even under the historical conditions of civilization, he still personifies the world, and ascribes to it the forms of his own body and limbs.

Again, we have plainly shown that man, by the intrinsic reduplication of his psychical faculty, spontaneously retains and personifies the inward phantasm generated by such a projection of special natural objects on his perception. In the genesis of such fetishes, and also when, by an effort of will, he recalls them to his mind, this faculty with its constituent elements is brought into action. In fact, when the image is recalled to the mind, it is represented like the external phenomenon; and consequently it involves and generates the thing of which the phenomenon is the external vest, that is, its causative power; and in this way the objective process of its formation is inwardly reproduced. Since the cosmic reality is thus ideally reproduced, the inward substance of the fetish assumes a really efficacious power, whether in its extrinsic form, or in its intrinsic image, and in this way primitive superstitions had their source.

In the case of savage and primitive man the inward image of the fetish without its bodily presence is, owing to the process already described, not merely valid as a real entity, but it becomes a mysterious apparition in the sphere of fancy, in a way analogous to our belief in the reality of things seen in a dream or in moments of hallucination. This appears in the history of all peoples past and present, whence it is certain that primitive man not only formed personifications of external objects and of his own emotions, but also of their images, as they were retained in his memory. In both cases the sequence of the three elements of apprehension, the phenomenon, subject, and cause, is due to the same unique faculty; in a word, the inward perception is identical in its genesis and laws with that which is external.