tion; that which first
appeared in an objective and extrinsic form became subjective and
intrinsic, a transition which was effected by the nominalists. This gave
rise to a cognition which was altogether psychological; at first reality
was wholly objective, and the ideas were only a sublime intellectual
myth, but now the objective world disappeared, and the intellect which
formulated the conception was the only real thing. In virtue of the
faculty of entification, only the mind and its ideas were real, the
world and all which it contained had a doubtful existence. This tendency
had its ultimate expression in Fichte, who created the universe by means
of the Ego, thus transforming the earlier objective myth into one which
was wonderfully subjective. Descartes doubted about everything beyond
the range of his own thought, and was the first to overthrow the former
ideal realism, and to lead the way to science, and to more rational
analysis. To him the teaching of Spinoza and Kant was really due, as
well as the English schools which had so much to do with the destruction
of the earlier mythical edifice of ideas.

But, as I have already observed, if this great rational progress were
important on the one side, on the other it produced a more spiritualized
form of myth, namely the subjective, which became still more powerful in
the philosophy of Kant. While some thinkers sought to resolve and
dissolve the objective myth, they did it in such a way as to add
strength to the subjective form of myth and science, for which Descartes
had prepared the way; the theory of Spinoza and of the German school in
general fundamentally consists in the substitution of entified forms and
dialectics of the mind for the earlier objective forms of ideas. A great
error was rectified, and the former phase of the intellectual evolution
of myth disappeared, in favour of another which, although still
erroneous, was more rational and independent.

The subjective and still mythical representations, either of the mind or
of external objects, were afterwards reduced to true science by positive
and experimental methods, aided by instruments, and confirmed by the
discoveries of Galileo and of his disciples throughout the civilized
world. He was in modern times another great factor of the dissolution of
myth, so far as it is definitive. Nature was made subordinate to weight
and measure, and to their mathematical and mechanical proportions in
various phenomena;