life; and which give an aspect of
complete reality to the hopes of immediate action by which, more easily
than by any other method, men can reform their desires, passions, and
mental activity. We know, moreover, that these social myths in no way
prevent a man profiting by the observations which he makes in the course
of his life, and form no obstacle to the pursuit of his normal
occupations.

The truth of this may be shown by numerous examples.

The first Christians expected the return of Christ and the total ruin of
the pagan world, with the inauguration of the kingdom of the saints, at
the end of the first generation. The catastrophe did not come to pass,
but Christian thought profited so greatly from the apocalyptic myth that
certain contemporary scholars maintain that the whole preaching of
Christ referred solely to this one point. The hopes which Luther and
Calvin had formed of the religious exaltation of Europe were by no means
realised; these fathers of the Reformation very soon seemed men of a
past era; for present-day Protestants they belong rather to the Middle
Ages than to modern times, and the problems which troubled them most
occupy very little place in contemporary Protestantism. Must we for that
reason deny the immense result which came from their dreams of Christian
renovation? It must be admitted that the real developments of the
Revolution did not in any way resemble the enchanting pictures which
created the enthusiasm of its first adepts; but without those pictures,
would the Revolution have been victorious? Many Utopias were mixed up
with the Revolutionary myth, because it had been formed by a society
passionately fond of imaginative literature, full of confidence in the
"science," and very little acquainted with the economic history of the
past. These Utopias came to nothing; but it may be asked whether the
Revolution was not a much more profound transformation than those
dreamed of by the people who in the eighteenth century had invented
social Utopias. In our own times Mazzini pursued what the wiseacres of
his time called a mad chimera; but it can no longer be denied that,
without Mazzini, Italy would never have become a great power, and that
he did more for Italian unity than Cavour and all the politicians of his
school.

A knowledge of what the myths contain in the way of details which will
actually form part of the history of the future is then of small
importance; they are not astrological