arest approach to what they
wished to express; something that should be incorporeal, yet closely
connected with the body. The Greek {~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMEGA WITH PERISPOMENI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}, too, is not much more than the
shadow, while the Latin _manes_ meant probably in the beginning no more
than the Little Ones, the Small Folk.(31) But the curious part, as showing
again the influence of language on thought, an influence more powerful
even than the evidence of the senses, is this, that people who speak of
the life or soul as the shadow of the body, have brought themselves to
believe that a dead body casts no shadow, because the shadow has departed
from it; that it becomes, in fact, a kind of Peter Schlemihl.(32)

Let us now return to mythology in the narrower sense of the word. One of
the earliest objects that would strike and stir the mind of man, and for
which a sign or a name would soon be wanted, is surely the Sun. It is very
hard for us to realize the feelings with which the first dwellers on the
earth looked upon the sun, or to understand fully what they meant by a
morning prayer, or a morning sacrifice. Perhaps there are few people here
present who have watched a sunrise more than once or twice in their lives;
few people who have ever known the true meaning of a morning prayer, or a
morning sacrifice. But think of man at the very dawn of time: forget for a
moment, if you can, after having read the fascinating pages of Mr. Darwin,
forget what man is supposed to have been before he was man; forget it,
because it does not concern us here whether his bodily form and frame were
developed once for all in the mind of a Creator, or gradually in the
creation itself, which from the first monad or protoplasm to the last of
the primates, or man, is not, I suppose, to be looked on as altogether
causeless, meaningless, purposeless; think of him only as man (and man
means the thinker), with his mind yet lying fallow, though full of
germs--germs of which I hold as strongly as ever no trace has ever, no
trace will ever, be discovered anywhere but in man; think of the Sun
awakening the eyes of man from sleep, and his mind from slumber! Was not
the Sunrise to him the first wonder, the first beginning of all
reflection, all thought, all philosophy? was it not to him the fi