In a certain sense the sentence may even be called the earlier, for, especially in the more incomplete stages of language, the words of a sentence are so uncertainly distinguished that they seem to be nothing but the products of a breaking up of an originally unitary thought expressed by the whole sentence. There is no universal rule for the order of words, any more than there is for the relation of sound to meaning. The order that logic favors with a view to the relations of reciprocal logical dependence between concepts, has no psychological universality; it appears, in fact, to be a fairly late product of development, due in part to arbitrary convention, and approached only by the prose forms of some modern languages which are syntactically nearly fixed. The original principle followed in apperceptive combination of words is obviously this, the [p. 303] order of the words corresponds to the succession of ideas. Especially those parts of speech that represent the ideas which arouse the most intense feelings and attract the attention, are placed first. Following this principle, certain regularities in the order of words are developed in any given community. In fact, such a regularity is to be observed even in the natural gesture-language of the deaf and dumb. Still, it is easy to understand that the most various modifications in this respect may appear under special circumstances, and that the possible range of these modifications is very great. In general, however, the habits of association lead more and more to the fixation of particular syntactic forms, so that a certain rigidity usually results.
Apart from the general laws presented in the discussion of apperceptive combinations, and there shown to arise from the general psychical functions of relating and comparing (p. 264), the detailed discussion of the characteristics of syntactic combinations and their gradual changes, must be left, in spite of their psychological importance, to social psychology, because they depend so much on the specific dispositions and conditions of civilization in a given community. B. MYTHS.
7. The development of myths is closely related to that of language.
Mythological thought is based, to be sure, just as language itself, upon certain attributes that are never lost in human consciousness; still, these attributes are modified and limited by a great variety of influences. As the fundamental function which in its various forms of activity gives rise to all mythological ideas, we have a characteristic kind of apperception belonging to all naive consciousness and suitably designated by the name personifying apperception. It consists in the complete determination of the apperceived [p. 304] objects through the nature of the perceiving subject.
The subject not only sees his own sensations, emotions, an voluntary movements reproduced in the objects, but even his momentary affective state is in each case especially influential in determining this view of the phenomena perceived, and in arousing ideas of their relations to his own existence.
As a necessary result of such a view the same personal attributes that the subject finds in himself are assigned to the object. The inner attributes, of feeling, emotion, etc., are never omitted, while the outer attributes of voluntary action and other manifestations like those of men, are generally dependent on movements actually perceived. The savage may thus attribute to stones, plants, and works of art, an inner capacity for sensations and feelings and their resulting effects, but he usually assumes immediate action only in the case of moving objects, such as clouds, heavenly bodies, winds, etc. In all these cases the personification is favored by associative assimilations which may readily reach the intensity of illusions of fancy (p. 268).
8. Myth-making, or personifying, apperception is not to be regarded as a special form or even as a distinct sub-form of apperception. It is nothing but the natural incentive stage of apperception in general. The child shows continually obvious traces of it, partly in the activities of his imagination in play (p. 293), partly in the fact that strong emotions, especially fear and fright, easily arouse illusions of fancy with an affective character analogous to that of the emotion. In this case, however, the manifestations of a tendency to form myths are early checked and soon entirely suppressed through the influences of the child's environment and education.
With savage and partly civilized peoples it is different. There the surrounding influences present a whole mass of mythological ideas to the individual consciousness. These, too, originated [p. 305] in the minds of individuals, and have gradually become fixed in some particular community, and in continual interrelation with language have, like the latter, been transmitted from generation to generation and become gradually modified in the transition from savage to civilized conditions.