f a
deceased man, whose memory survives; but any general theory of a
hierarchy, or of the world or man, is not yet visible. Even such
immature notions are, however, so far as they go, framed within the
category of causality; only, the will of the god takes the place of all
other force. This stage of religious thought has been called Animism, a
name which does not express its peculiarity, which is, that all force is
not only supposed to proceed from mind, but through what metaphysicians
call "immanent volition," that is, through will independent of relation.
Mind as "emanant volition," in unison with matter and law, the "seat of
law," to use an expression of Professor Boole's, may prove the highest
conception of force.

As the slowly growing reason reached more general notions, the law which
prescribes unity as a condition of thought led man early in his history
to look upon nature as one, and to seek for some one law of its changes;
the experience of social order impressed him with the belief that the
unseen agencies around him also bore relations to each other, and
acknowledged subjection to a leader; and the pangs of sickness, hunger
and terror to which he was daily exposed, and more than all the "last
and greatest of all terribles, death," which he so often witnessed,
turned his early meditations toward his own origin and destiny.

Around these three subjects of thought his fancy busied itself, striving
to fabricate some theory which would solve the enigmas which his reason
everywhere met, some belief which would relieve him from the haunting
horror of the unknown. Hence arose three great cycles of myths, which
recur with strangely similar physiognomies in all continents and among
all races. They are the myths of the Epochs of Nature, the Hierarchy of
the Gods, and of the Paradise lost but to be regained. Wherever we turn,
whether to the Assyrian tablets or to the verses of the Voluspa, to the
crude fancies of the red man of the new world or the black man of the
African plateau, to the sacred books of the modern Christian or of the
ancient Brahman, we find these same questions occupying his mind, and in
meaning and in form the same solutions proffered. Through what
intellectual operations he reached these solutions, and their validity,
as tested by the known criteria of truth, it is the province of the
philosophy of mythology to determine.

Let us study the psychological growth of the myth of the Epochs of
Nature.