to do so unless it were a part of the natural world open
to sense; while gravitation and natural selection, without being
existences, can be verified at every moment by concrete events occurring
as those principles require. A hypothesis, being a discursive device,
gains its utmost possible validity when its discursive value is
established. It _is_ not, it merely _applies_; and every situation in
which it is found to apply is a proof of its truth.

The case would not be different with fables, were their basis and
meaning remembered. But fables, when hypostatised, forget that they,
too, were transitive symbols and boast to reveal an undiscoverable
reality. A dogmatic myth is in this sorry plight: that the more evidence
it can find to support it the more it abrogates its metaphysical
pretensions, while the more it insists on its absolute truth the less
relevance it has to experience and the less meaning. To try to support
fabulous dogmas by evidence is tantamount to acknowledging that they are
merely scientific hypotheses, instruments of discourse, and methods of
expression. But in that case their truth would no longer be supposed to
lie in the fact that somewhere beyond the range of human observation
they descended bodily to the plane of flying existence, and were
actually enacted there. They would have ceased to resemble the society
of Olympus, which to prove itself real would need to verify itself,
since only the gods and those mortals admitted to their conclave could
know for a fact that that celestial gathering existed. On the contrary,
a speculation that could be supported by evidence would be one that
might be made good without itself descending to the plane of immediacy,
but would be sufficiently verified when diffuse facts fall out as it had
led us to expect. The myth in such a case would have become transparent
again and relevant to experience, which could continually serve to
support or to correct it. Even if somewhat overloaded and poetical, it
would be in essence a scientific theory. It would no longer terminate in
itself; it would point forward, leading the thinker that used it to
eventual facts of experience, facts which his poetic wisdom would have
prepared him to meet and to use.

[Sidenote: Possible validity of myths.]

If I say, for instance, that Punishment, limping in one leg, patiently
follows every criminal, the myth is obvious and innocent enough. It
reveals nothing, but, what is far better, it me