ans something. I have
expressed a truth of experience and pointed vaguely to the course which
events may be expected to take under given circumstances. The
expression, though mythical in form, is scientific in effect, because it
tends to surround a given phenomenon (the crime) with objects on its own
plane--other passions and sensations to follow upon it. What would be
truly mythical would be to stop at the figure of speech and maintain, by
way of revealed dogma, that a lame goddess of vindictive mind actually
follows every wicked man, her sword poised in mid-air. Sinking into that
reverie, and trembling at its painted truth, I should be passing to the
undiscoverable and forgetting the hard blows actually awaiting me in the
world. Fable, detaining the mind too long in the mesh of expression,
would have become metaphysical dogma. I should have connected the given
fact with imagined facts, which even if by chance real--for such a
goddess may, for all we know, actually float in the fourth
dimension--are quite supernumerary in my world, and never, by any
possibility, can become parts or extensions of the experience they are
thought to explain. The gods are demonstrable only as hypotheses, but as
hypotheses they are not gods.

[Sidenote: Any dreamed-of thing might be experienced.]

The same distinction is sometimes expressed by saying that science deals
only with objects of possible experience. But this expression is
unfortunate, because everything thinkable, no matter how mythical and
supernatural or how far beyond the range of mortal senses, is an object
of _possible_ experience. Tritons and sea-horses might observe one
another and might feel themselves live. The thoughts and decrees said to
occupy the divine mind from all eternity would certainly be phenomena
there; they would be experienced things. Were fables really as
metaphysical and visionary as they pretend to be, were they not all the
while and in essence mere symbols for natural situations, they would be
nothing but reports about other alleged parts of experience. A real
Triton, a real Creator, a real heaven would obviously be objects open to
properly equipped senses and seats of much vivid experience. But a
Triton after all has something to do with the AEgean and other earthly
waters; a Creator has something to do with the origin of man and of his
habitat; heaven has something to do with the motives and rewards of
moral action. This relevance to given experience