or in his own, and choked that malaria only by supreme
toil,--I might tell you that this serpent was formed by the goddess whose
pride was in the trial of Hercules; and that its place of abode as by a
palm-tree; and that for every head of it that was cut off, two rose up
with renewed life; and that the hero found at last that he could not kill
the creature at all by cutting its heads off or crushing them, but only
by burning them down; and that the midmost of them could not be killed
even that way, but had to be buried alive. Only in proportion as I mean
more, I shall certainly appear more absurd in my statement; and at last
when I get unendurably significant, all practical persons will agree that
I was talking mere nonsense from the beginning, and never meant anything
at all.

3. It is just possible, however, also, that the story-teller may all
along have meant nothing but what he said; and that, incredible as the
events may appear, he himself literally believed--and expected you also
to believe--all this about Hercules, without any latent moral or history
whatever. And it is very necessary, in reading traditions of this kind,
to determine, first of all, whether you are listening to a simple person,
who is relating what, at all events, he believes to be true, (and may,
therefore, possibly have been so to some extent), or to a reserved
philosopher, who is veiling a theory of the universe under the grotesque
of a fairy tale. It is, in general, more likely that the first
supposition should be the right one: simple and credulous persons are,
perhaps fortunately, more common than philosophers; and it is of the
highest importance that you should take their innocent testimony as it
was meant, and not efface, under the graceful explanation which your
cultivated ingenuity may suggest, either the evidence their story may
contain (such as it is worth) of an extraordinary event having really
taken place, or the unquestionable light which it will cast upon the
character of the person by whom it was frankly believed. And to deal
with Greek religion honestly, you must at once understand that this
literal belief was, in the mind of the general people, as deeply rooted
as ours in the legends of our own sacred book; and that a basis of
unmiraculous event was as little suspected, and an explanatory symbolism
as rarely traced, by them, as by us.

You must, therefore, observe that I deeply degrade the position which
such a myth as t