felt to
terminate in an independent existence on a higher or deeper level than
any immediate fact; and this circumstance is what makes myth impossible
to verify and, except by laughter, to disprove. If I attributed the
stars' shining to the diligence of angels who lighted their lamps at
sunset, lest the upper reaches of the world should grow dangerous for
travellers, and if I made my romance elaborate and ingenious enough, I
might possibly find that the stars' appearance and disappearance could
continue to be interpreted in that way. My myth might always suggest
itself afresh and might be perennially appropriate. But it would never
descend, with its charming figures, into the company of its evidences.
It would never prove that what it terminated in was a fact, as in my
metaphysical faith I had deputed and asserted it to be. The angels would
remain notional, while my intent was to have them exist; so that the
more earnestly I held to my fable the more grievously should I be
deceived. For even if seraphic choirs existed in plenty on their own
emotional or musical plane of being, it would not have been their
hands--if they had hands--that would have lighted the stars I saw; and
this, after all, was the gist and starting-point of my whole fable and
its sole witness in my world. A myth might by chance be a revelation,
did what it talks of have an actual existence somewhere else in the
universe; but it would need to be a revelation in order to be true at
all, and would then be true only in an undeserved and spurious fashion.
Any representative and provable validity which it might possess would
assimulate it to science and reduce it to a mere vehicle and instrument
for human discourse. It would evaporate as soon as the prophecies it
made were fulfilled, and it would claim no being and no worship on its
own account. Science might accordingly be called a myth conscious of its
essential ideality, reduced to its fighting weight and valued only for
its significance.

[Sidenote: Moral value of science.]

A symptom of the divergence between myth and science may be found in the
contrary emotions which they involve. Since in myth we interpret
experience in order to interpret it, in order to delight ourselves by
turning it poetically into the language and prosody of our own life, the
emotion we feel when we succeed is artistic; myth has a dramatic charm.
Since in science, on the contrary, we employ notional machinery, in
itself perha