ABSTRACT
The opposition between “subject” and “object,” the differentiation of the "I" from all tangible givenness and determinacy, is not the only form in which progress is made from a general, still-undifferentiated life-feeling to the concept and consciousness of the “self”. For mythical-religious consciousness, the boundaries of the species “the human” are not rigid but thoroughly fluid. Only through a progressive concentration, only through a gradual narrowing of that general life-feeling in which myth originates, does it gradually arrive at the specifically human feeling of community. According to the traditional theory of logic, in the circle of the mere intuition of things, any increase in the extension of a concept likewise brings about a corresponding impoverishment of its contents. The mythical feeling and thinking progress along this path, the more clearly the figure of a supreme creator god is singled out from among the mere specialized gods and from the throng of individual polytheistic gods.
