hich take
place in the common consciousness, it changes but little in character.
The common consciousness itself changes with exceeding slowness; it
retains what it has received with a conservatism like that of
children's minds; and, what it adds must, from the nature of the case,
be modelled on that which it has received, and be of a piece with it.
But, though the common consciousness changes but slowly, it does
change: with the change from savagery to civilisation there goes moral
development. Some of the myths, which are re-told from one generation
to another, may be capable of becoming civilised and moralised in
proportion as do those who tell them; but some are not. These latter
are incidents in the personal history of the gods, which, if told at
all, can only be told, as they had been told from the beginning, in
all their repulsiveness. They survive, in virtue of the tenacity and
conservatism of the common consciousness; and, as survivals, they
testify to the moral development which has taken place in the very
community which conserves them. By them the eye of modern science
measures the development and the difference between the stage of
society which originally produced them and the stage which begins to
be troubled by them. They are valuable for the purposes of modern
science because they are evidence of the continuity with which the
later stages have developed from the earlier; and, also, because they
are the first outward indications of the discovery which was
eventually to be made, of the difference between mythology and
religion--a difference which existed from the beginning of mythology,
and all through its growth, though it existed in the sphere of feeling
long before it found expression for itself in words.

The course of history has shown, as a matter of fact, that these
repulsive and disgusting myths could not be rooted out without
uprooting the whole system of mythology. But the course of history has
also shown that religion could continue to exist after the destruction
of mythology, as it had done before its birth. But, of this the
generations to whom myths had been transmitted and for whom mythology
was the accepted belief, could not be aware. In their eyes the attempt
to discredit some myths appeared to involve--as it did really
involve--the overthrow of the whole system of mythology. If they
thought--as they undoubtedly did think--that the destruction of
mythology was the same thing as the destru