in a
new light. And that sense of oneness with his physical
environment which the nature-mystic so often experiences and
enjoys is recognised as an inevitable outcome of the facts of
existence. Goethe is right:

"Ihr folget falsche Spur;
Denkt nicht, wir scherzon!
Ist nicht der Kern der Natur
Menschen im Herzen."

CHAPTER XII

MYTHOLOGY

The materials are now fairly complete for understanding the rise
and development of animism. The untrained primitive intellect
was stirred by vague intuitions--stimulated by contact with an
external world constituted of essentially the same "stuff" as
itself--and struggled to find concrete expression for its
experiences. The root idea round which all else grouped itself
was that of the agency of indwelling powers like unto man's, but
endowed with wider activities, and unhampered by many
human limitations. The forms of expression adopted often
appear to us to be almost gratuitously absurd; but when we put
ourselves as nearly as may be at the primitive point of view, we
realise that they were not even illogical. The marvel is that out
of the seething chaos of sensations and emotions there could
arise the solid structure of even the simplest kinds of
conceptual, ordered knowledge.

There are few critics, however, who are not now prepared to put
themselves into sympathetic touch with the primitive thinker;
but there are still many who hesitate, or refuse, to allow any
value to the products of his thinking. These products are too
frequently dismissed as the fancies and babblings of ages in
which real knowledge was not as yet a practicable achievement.
Such an estimate is as unfair as it is unphilosophical. It
disregards the part played by intuition, and it is blind to the
germs of truth which were destined to ripen into noble fruit.
Mother Earth, with air and sunshine, and starry heaven above,
nurtured men's thoughts and souls as well as their bodies.

There is more than an analogy between the childhood of the
race and the childhood of the individual. And just as the child
plunges us at times, by questions, into problems of the deepest
import, so is it with unexpected flashes of insight preserved for
us in the records, written or unwritten, of the earliest workings
of the human mind. "The soul of man" (says Caird), "even at its
worst, is a wonderful instrument for the world to play on; and in
the vicissitudes of life, it cannot avoid having its highe