he Celt, the
Semite, and the savage. It goes back to a period of human history
which has only tradition for its authority, in respect of which no
contemporary records exist, and which relates to a time when the
ancestors of now scattered peoples lived together, and when they were
struggling from the position of obedient slaves to all the fears which
unknown nature inflicted on them, to that of observers of the forces
of nature.

Traditions which are properly classed as myth are those which are too
ancient to be identified with historical personages, and too little
realistic to be a relation of historical episodes. They are rather the
explanations given by primitive philosophers of events which were
beyond their ken, and yet needed and claimed explanation. In this
class of tradition we are in touch with the struggles of the earliest
ancestors of man to learn about the unknown. Our own research in the
realms of the unknown we dignify by the name and glories of science.
The research of our remote ancestors was of like kind, though the
domain of the unknown was so different from our own. It was primitive
science.

The best type of this class of myth is, I think, the creation
myth.[184] Everywhere, almost, man has for a moment stood apart and
asked himself the question, Whence am I?--stood apart from the
struggle for existence when that struggle was in its most severe
stages. The answer he has given himself was the answer of the Darwin
of his period. From the narrow observation of the natural man and his
surroundings, governed by the enormous impressions of his own life,
the answer has obviously not been scientific in our sense of the term.
But it was scientific. It was the science of primitive man, and if we
have to reject it as science not so good as our science, nay, as not
science at all judged by our standard, we must not deny to primitive
man the claim of having preceded modern man in his observation and
interpretation of the world of nature.

The range of the creation myth is almost world-wide. It includes
examples from all quarters, and examples of great beauty as well as of
singular, almost grotesque hideousness; the New Zealand myth is surely
the best type of the former, and perhaps the Fijian of the latter. As
Mr. Lang says: "all the cosmogonic myths waver between the theory of
construction, or rather of reconstruction and the theory of evolution
very rudely conceived."[185]

It is not necessary to quote a l