bjects or appearances in nature, but also in relation to
occurrences, traditions, usages. In this way innumerable myths
arise, explanatory or amplifying thoughts secreted by the
stimulated imagination and then narrated as events. Sometimes
these tales are given and received in good faith for truth, as
Grote abundantly proves in his volume on Legendary Greece;
sometimes they are clearly the gleeful play of the fancy, as when
it is said that the hated infant Herakles having been put to
Hera's breast as she lay asleep in heaven, she, upon waking,
thrust him away, and the lacteal fluid, streaming athwart the
firmament, originated the Milky Way! To apply this law to our
special subject:

1 Chambers's Papers for the People, vol. i.: The Myth, p. 1.

What would be likely to work more powerfully on the minds of a
crude, sensitive people, in an early stage of the world, with no
elaborate discipline of religious thought, than the facts and
phenomena of death? Plainly, around this centre there must be
deposited a vast quantity of ideas and fantasies. The task is to
discriminate them, trace their individual origin, and classify
them.

One of the most interesting and difficult questions connected with
the subject before us is this: What, in any given time and place,
were the limits of the popular belief? How much of the current
representations in relation to another life were held as strict
verity? What portions were regarded as fable or symbolism? It is
obvious enough that among the civilized nations of antiquity the
distinctions of literal statement, allegory, historic report,
embellished legend, satire, poetic creation, philosophical
hypothesis, religious myth, were more or less generally known. For
example, when Aschylus makes one of his characters say, "Yonder
comes a herald: so Dust, Clay's thirsty sister, tells me," the
personification, unquestionably, was as purposed and conscious as
it is when a poet in the nineteenth century says, "Thirst dived
from the brazen glare of the sky and clutched me by the throat."
So, too, when Homer describes the bag of Aolus, the winds, in
possession of the sailors on board Ulysses' ship, the half
humorous allegory cannot be mistaken for religious faith. It is
equally obvious that these distinctions were not always carefully
observed, but were often confounded. Therefore, in respect to the
faith of primitive times, it is impossible to draw any broad,
fixed lines and say conclusively th