t our mortality, our concomitant
immortality may have dawned upon us. While we are waiting for the
command to take up our bed and walk we may hear a voice saying: Thy sins
are forgiven thee.

CHAPTER IV

MYTHOLOGY

[Sidenote: Status of fable in the mind.]

Primitive thought has the form of poetry and the function of prose.
Being thought, it distinguishes objects from the experience that reveals
them and it aspires to know things as they are; but being poetical, it
attributes to those objects all the qualities which the experience of
them contains, and builds them out imaginatively in all directions,
without distinguishing what is constant and efficacious in them. This
primitive habit of thought survives in mythology, which is an
observation of things encumbered with all they can suggest to a dramatic
fancy. It is neither conscious poetry nor valid science, but the common
root and raw material of both. Free poetry is a thing which early man is
too poor to indulge in; his wide-open eyes are too intently watching
this ominous and treacherous world. For pure science he has not enough
experience, no adequate power to analyse, remember, and abstract; his
soul is too hurried and confused, too thick with phantoms, to follow
abstemiously the practical threads through the labyrinth. His view of
things is immensely overloaded; what he gives out for description is
more than half soliloquy; but his expression of experience is for that
very reason adequate and quite sincere. Belief, which we have come to
associate with religion, belongs really to science; myths are not
believed in, they are conceived and understood. To demand belief for an
idea is already to contrast interpretation with knowledge; it is to
assert that that idea has scientific truth. Mythology cannot flourish in
that dialectical air; it belongs to a deeper and more ingenuous level of
thought, when men pored on the world with intense indiscriminate
interest, accepting and recording the mind's vegetation no less than
that observable in things, and mixing the two developments together in
one wayward drama.

[Sidenote: It requires genius.]

A good mythology cannot be produced without much culture and
intelligence. Stupidity is not poetical. Nor is mythology essentially a
half-way house between animal vagueness in the soul and scientific
knowledge. It is conceivable that some race, not so dreamful as ours,
should never have been tempted to use psychic and p