pted by one school of speculative thought, which sought to
overthrow the mythical representation of the world, was only an isolated
anticipation of a few philosophers; it has now become a scientific
evolution, common to all modern civilization. The theory of descent,
transformation, and the general evolution of species, followed as a
necessary corollary and immediate result of the dissolution of Plato's
mythical conception of specific ideas, and of all the generic but
material personifications with which nature had been peopled. When such
conceptions of the ideal world were dissipated, those of the actual
world of nature soon followed, and this de-personification of natural,
mythical species in the vast organic kingdom is one of the most splendid
intellectual achievements of the age.

This victory of the natural sciences has reacted on those which are
psychological, and on the theory of the mind, and has subjected them to
the necessities and form of this new phase of the evolution of thought.
The subjective had been substituted for the objective myth and had
created the forms of mind, its logical laws and intrinsic process, the
objective synthesis of the world, and it was now influenced by the
stupendous discoveries and analyses of other sciences, so that
psychology was in its turn transformed into a science, not only of
observation, but of experiment. Measure, weight, numerical proportion,
in short the experimental method, took possession of the facts, acts,
and processes of the mind, as of every other object and subject of
nature. In addition to the great names of modern psychologists in
England, we may mention among other experimental psychologists in
Germany, Fechner, Wundt, Lotze, Helmholtz, Weber, Kammler, etc.;
illustrious men in France and elsewhere might also be cited to show what
progress has been made and is about to be made in this field. The
destruction of myth and of the subjective myths of psychology is always
going on, and a positive science of mental phenomena has arisen, like
that of natural phenomena. The ultimate phase of myth is so near its end
that it has been possible to create a psychology implying the absence of
a soul. The scientific faculty has now indeed a complete ascendency over
the mythical representation with which it was originally coeval.

Yet we do not mean to say that myth is extinct. In the case of the great
majority of the human race, a small and elect portion excepted, myth and
al