ggle for existence, and as applied in well-nigh all
departments of enquiry and research. But it is enough to have
grasped the central principle of Fire-motion to prove that the
phenomena of fire have had an influence in the development of
man's intellectual and spiritual life--an influence which cannot
easily be exaggerated. Heracleitus claims an honoured place in
the line of nature-mystics.

CHAPTER XXVIII

FIRE AND THE SUN

There can be no doubt, as already stated, that, of all physical
phenomena, fire had the most marked effect upon the imagination
of primitive man. He saw that it was utterly unlike anything
else known to him, both in its properties and in its action.
If of anything a divine nature could be predicated, it was
fire--the standing miracle--at once destroying and life-giving--
material and immaterial--pre-eminently an agent with strange
and vast powers, known and unknown. For many objects and
institutions a divine origin was sought; it could not fail to be the
case with fire. Even the poor Tasmanian natives felt it could not
be a thing of earth, and told each other how it was thrown down
like a star by two black fellows who are now in the sky, the twin
stars, Castor and Pollux. A great gap separates this simple tale
from the elaborate Prometheus myth, and yet the same essential
features appear in both: and between the two are found a varied
series of stories and legends, belonging to many climes and
ages, which ring the changes on the same fundamental ideas.
The whole of the ancient world believed that the origin of fire
must be divine. And the various steps can be clearly traced by
which the worship, originally accorded to the nature-power
itself, was transferred to a spirit behind the power, and centred
at last on the supreme Deity.

For primitive man, as Max Mueller well points out, the
phenomena of fire would present a dual aspect--on the one hand
as a fatal and destructive element, on the other hand, as a
beneficent and even homely agency. The lightning would be
seen flashing from the one end of heaven to the other, darting
down at times to set ablaze the forests and prairies, at times to
maim and kill both animals and men. Thus experienced, it
would strike terror into the beholders, and impress them with a
vivid sense of the presence of spiritual powers. As a late
product of the emotions and conceptions thus stimulated, we
have the fine myth of the ancient nature goddess, Athene--
spru