doubtless be perpetrated none the less by the same persons had they
absorbed in youth a different religion; for conduct is rooted in deep
instincts which affect opinion more than opinion can avail to affect
them in turn. Yet there is an added indignity in not preserving a clear
and honest mind, and in quitting the world without having in some
measure understood and appreciated it.

[Sidenote: The price of mythology is superstition.]

Pantheism is mythical and has, as we have just seen, all the subversive
powers of ordinary superstition. It turns the natural world, man's
stamping-ground and system of opportunities, into a self-justifying and
sacred life; it endows the blameless giant with an inhuman soul and then
worships the monstrous divinity it has fabricated. It thereby encounters
the same dilemma that defeats all mythology when it forgets its merely
poetic office and trespasses upon moral ground. It must either interpret
the natural world faithfully, attributing to the mythical deity the sort
of life that dramatically suits its visible behaviour, or if it
idealises and moralises the spectacle it must renounce the material
reality and efficacy of its gods. Either the cosmic power must cover the
actual goodness and badness in nature impartially, when to worship it
would be idolatrous, or it must cover only the better side of nature,
those aspects of it which support and resemble human virtue. In the
latter case it is human virtue that mythology is formulating in a
dramatic fiction, a human ideal that is being illustrated by a poet,
who selects for the purpose certain phases of nature and experience. By
this idealisation the affinity which things often have to man's
interests may be brought out in a striking manner; but their total and
real mechanism is no better represented than that of animals in AEsop's
fables. To detect the divergence it suffices to open the eyes; and while
nature may be rationally admired and cherished for so supporting the
soul, it is her eventual ministry to man that makes her admirable, not
her independent magnitude or antiquity. To worship nature as she really
is, with all her innocent crimes made intentional by our mythology and
her unfathomable constitution turned into a caricature of barbarian
passions, is to subvert the order of values and to falsify natural
philosophy. Yet this dislocation of reason, both in its conceptions and
in its allegiance, is the natural outcome of thinking on my