absence of the sense
of proportion. Perhaps it was necessary, considering the place which
the Hebrew tradition occupies in civilised thought, to show its utter
inconsistency with the facts of nature, but it was equally necessary
to show that it has its place in the history of human thought. The
folklorist replaces it among the myths of creation, and then proceeds
to analyse and value it. The Hebrew is shown by the myth he adopted to
have frankly acknowledged that the origin of man and of the world was
undiscoverable by him. Whatever older myths he once possessed, he
discarded them in favour of a mythic God-creator, and this is only
another way of stating that the mystery of man's origin could not, to
the Hebrew mind, be met by such a myth as the New Zealander believed
in, or as the Kumis believed in, but could only be met by the larger
conception of a special creation. The Hebrew could not find his answer
in nature, so he appealed to super-nature. His God was the unknown
God, and the realm of the unknown God was the unknowable. Though in
terms this may not be the interpretation of the Hebrew creation myth,
its ultimate resolve is this; and because modern science has
penetrated beyond this confession of the unknown origin of man to the
evolution of man, it should not therefore treat contemptuously the
effort of early Hebrew science. Because it is not possible to admit
this effort as part of modern science, it must not be rejected from
the entire region of science. It must be respected as one of the many
efforts which have made possible the last effort of all which
proclaims that man has kinship with all the animal world.

These points illustrate the unsatisfactory attitude of science and
religion to myth. There is still to notice the unsatisfactory
attitude of the folklorist. Wrong interpretation of special classes of
myth is, of course, to be anticipated in the commencement of a great
study such as folklore; but there are also wrong interpretations of
the fundamental basis of myth. Thus even Mr. Frazer, with all his vast
research into savage thought and action, doubts the possession of good
logical faculty by mankind. If mankind, he says, had always been
logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and
crime.[191] But surely we cannot doubt man's logical powers. They have
been too strong for his facts. He has applied mercilessly all the
powers of his logical faculties upon isolated observations of