and its objects is what
cuts those myths off from their blameless and gratuitous role of
reporting experiences that might be going on merrily enough somewhere
else in the universe. In calling them myths and denying that what they
describe falls within the purview of science, we do not assert that,
absolutely taken, they could not be objects of a possible experience.
What we mean is rather that no matter how long we searched the sea
waves, in which it is the essence of our Tritons to disport themselves,
we should never find Tritons there; and that if we traced back the
history of man and nature we should find them always passing by natural
generation out of slightly different earlier forms and never appearing
suddenly, at the fiat of a vehement Jehovah swimming about in a chaos;
and finally that if we considered critically our motives and our ideals,
we should find them springing from and directed upon a natural life and
its functions, and not at all on a disembodied and timeless ecstasy.
Those myths, then, while they intrinsically refer to facts in the given
world, describe those facts in incongruous terms. They are symbols, not
extensions, for the experience we know.

[Sidenote: But science follows the movement of its subject-matter.]

A chief characteristic of science, then, is that in supplementing given
facts it supplements them by adding other facts belonging to the same
sphere, and eventually discoverable by tracing the given object in its
own plane through its continuous transformations. Science expands
speculatively, by the aid of merely instrumental hypotheses, objects
given in perception until they compose a congruous, self-supporting
world, all parts of which might be observed consecutively. What a
scientific hypothesis interpolates among the given facts--the atomic
structure of things, for instance--might come in time under the direct
fire of attention, fixed more scrupulously, longer, or with better
instruments upon those facts themselves. Otherwise the hypothesis that
assumed that structure would be simply false, just as a hypothesis that
the interior of the earth is full of molten fire would be false if on
inspection nothing were found there but solid rock. Science does not
merely prolong a habit of inference; it verifies and solves the
inference by reaching the fact inferred.

The contrast with myth at this point is very interesting; for in myth
the facts are themselves made vehicles, and knowledge is