order to become all the
more objective, without ever succeeding therein completely.

This transformation occurs thanks to two principal supports: methodical
and prolonged observation of phenomena, which suggests the objective
notion of stability and law, opposed to the caprices of animism
(example: the work of the ancient astronomers of the Orient); the
growing power of reflection and of logical rigor, at least in
well-endowed races.

It does not concern the subject in hand to trace here the fortunes of
the old battle whereby the imagination, assailed by a rival power, loses
little by little its position and preponderance in the interpretation of
the world. A few remarks will suffice.

To begin with, the myth is transformed into philosophic speculation, but
without total disappearance, as is seen in the mystic speculations of
the Pythagoreans, in the cosmology of Empedocles, ruled by two
human-like antitheses, Love and Hate. Even to Thales, an observing,
positive spirit that calculates eclipses, the world is full of
_daemons_, remains of primitive animism.[63] In Plato, even leaving out
his theory of Ideas, the employment of myth is not merely a playful
mannerism, but a real survival.

This work of elimination, begun by the philosophers, is more firmly
established in the first attempts of pure science (the Alexandrian
mathematicians; naturalists like Aristotle; certain Greek physicians).
Nevertheless, we know how imaginary concepts remained alive in physics,
chemistry, biology, down to the sixteenth century; we know the bitter
struggle that the two following centuries witnessed against occult
qualities and loose methods. Even in our day, Stallo has been able to
propose to write a treatise "On Myth in Science." Without speaking at
this time of the hypotheses admitted as such and on account of their
usefulness, there yet remain in the sciences many latent signs of
primitive anthropomorphism. At the beginning of the nineteenth century
people believed in several "properties of matter" that we now regard as
merely modes of energy. But this latter notion, an expression of
permanence underneath the various manifestations of nature, is for
science only an abstract, symbolical formula: if we attempt to embody
it, to make it concrete and representable, then, whether we will or no,
it resolves itself into the feeling of muscular effort, that is, takes
on a human character. To produce no other examples, we see that so far
as