The internal form of the mythical consciousness: Konrad Theodor Preuss's contribution to Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms.

Preuss exercised a decisive influence, which has not received much study, on Cassirer's conception of mythical thought as formulated in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. It is advanced that Cassirer borrowed from Preuss the fundamental elements for the phenomenology of mythical thought. The argument hinges on two essential problems in transcendental philosophy: on the one hand, the unity and objective validity of representations and, on the other, the role of productive synthesis in dynamically determining them. The critique of animism and of the traditional epistemology applied to understanding the formation of religious conceptions places Preuss and Cassirer in the broader context of the German philosophical and anthropological tradition in the line with Kant, Humboldt and Usener.