assionate categories
in reading nature, but from the first should have kept its observations
sensuous and pure, elaborating them only on their own plane,
mathematically and dialectically. Such a race, however, could hardly
have had lyric or dramatic genius, and even in natural science, which
requires imagination, they might never have accomplished anything. The
Hebrews, denying themselves a rich mythology, remained without science
and plastic art; the Chinese, who seem to have attained legality and
domestic arts and a tutored sentiment without passing through such
imaginative tempests as have harassed us, remain at the same time
without a serious science or philosophy. The Greeks, on the contrary,
precisely the people with the richest and most irresponsible myths,
first conceived the cosmos scientifically, and first wrote rational
history and philosophy. So true it is that vitality in any mental
function is favourable to vitality in the whole mind. Illusions incident
to mythology are not dangerous in the end, because illusion finds in
experience a natural though painful cure. Extravagant error is unstable,
unless it be harmless and confined to a limbo remote from all
applications; if it touches experience it is stimulating and brief,
while the equipoise of dulness may easily render dulness eternal. A
developed mythology shows that man has taken a deep and active interest
both in the world and in himself, and has tried to link the two, and
interpret the one by the other. Myth is therefore a natural prologue to
philosophy, since the love of ideas is the root of both. Both are made
up of things admirable to consider.

[Sidenote: It only half deceives.]

Nor is the illusion involved in fabulous thinking always so complete and
opaque as convention would represent it. In taking fable for fact, good
sense and practice seldom keep pace with dogma. There is always a race
of pedants whose function it is to materialise everything ideal, but the
great world, half shrewdly, half doggedly, manages to escape their
contagion. Language may be entirely permeated with myth, since the
affinities of language have much to do with men gliding into such
thoughts; yet the difference between language itself and what it
expresses is not so easily obliterated. In spite of verbal traditions,
people seldom take a myth in the same sense in which they would take an
empirical truth. All the doctrines that have flourished in the world
about immortalit