passed through the
human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of
science. It has become a thing incurably mysterious and infinite; this
mortal has put on immortality. Even what we call our material desires
are spiritual, because they are human. Science can analyse a pork-chop,
and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but
science cannot analyse any man's wish for a pork-chop, and say how much
of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a
haunting love of the beautiful. The man's desire for the pork-chop
remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven.
All attempts, therefore, at a science of any human things, at a science
of history, a science of folk-lore, a science of sociology, are by
their nature not merely hopeless, but crazy. You can no more be certain
in economic history that a man's desire for money was merely a desire
for money than you can be certain in hagiology that a saint's desire
for God was merely a desire for God. And this kind of vagueness in the
primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final blow to anything
in the nature of a science. Men can construct a science with very few
instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could
construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out
the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a
handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and
falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and
earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.

As one of the enormous follies of folk-lore, let us take the case of
the transmigration of stories, and the alleged unity of their source.
Story after story the scientific mythologists have cut out of its place
in history, and pinned side by side with similar stories in their
museum of fables. The process is industrious, it is fascinating, and
the whole of it rests on one of the plainest fallacies in the world.
That a story has been told all over the place at some time or other,
not only does not prove that it never really happened; it does not even
faintly indicate or make slightly more probable that it never happened.
That a large number of fishermen have falsely asserted that they have
caught a pike two feet long, does not in the least affect the question
of whether any one ever really did so. That numberless journalists
announce a Franco-Ge