ABSTRACT
The basic structure of mythical thinking manifests itself in the tendency of mythical object consciousness and in the character of its concepts of reality, substance, and causality. It also seizes and determines the individual configurations of this thinking and, as it were, imprints its seal on them. The typical opposition between myth and cognition can be shown in the category of “similarity” no less than in the categories of the “whole” and the “part” and the category of the “property”. The organizing of the chaos of sensible impressions, in which certain groups of similarities are emphasized and certain series of similarities are formed is common to both logical and mythical thinking; without it, myth would not be able to arrive at fixed shapes any more than logical thought would be able to arrive at fixed concepts. For mythical thinking, any similarity in the sensible appearance suffices to group the formations in which it appears together into a single mythical “genus”.
