anything. Such an error, if carried through to
the end, would nullify all experience and arrest all life. Men would be
reacting on expressions and meeting with nothing to express. They would
all be like word-eating philosophers or children learning the catechism.

The true function of mythical ideas is to present and interpret events
in terms relative to spirit. Things have uses in respect to the will
which are direct and obvious, while the inner machinery of these same
things is intricate and obscure. We therefore conceive things roughly
and superficially by their eventual practical functions and assign to
them, in our game, some counterpart of the interest they affect in us.
This counterpart, to our thinking, constitutes their inward character
and soul. So conceived, soul and character are purely mythical, being
arrived at by dramatising events according to our own fancy and
interest. Such ideas may be adequate in their way if they cover all the
uses we may eventually find in the objects they transcribe for us
dramatically. But the most adequate mythology is mythology still; it
does not, like science, set things before us in the very terms they will
wear when they are gradually revealed to experience. Myth is expression,
it is not prophecy. For this reason myth is something on which the mind
rests; it is an ideal interpretation in which the phenomena are digested
and transmuted into human energy, into imaginative tissue.

[Sidenote: Contrast with science.]

Scientific formulas, on the contrary, cry aloud for retranslation into
perceptual terms; they are like tight-ropes, on which a man may walk but
on which he cannot stand still. These unstable symbols lead, however, to
real facts and define their experimental relations; while the mind
reposing contentedly in a myth needs to have all observation and
experience behind it, for it will not be driven to gather more. The
perfect and stable myth would rest on a complete survey and steady
focussing of all interests really affecting the one from whose point of
view the myth was framed. Then each physical or political unit would be
endowed with a character really corresponding to all its influence on
the thinker. This symbol would render the diffuse natural existences
which it represented in an eloquent figure; and since this figure would
not mislead practically it might be called true. But truth, in a myth,
means a sterling quality and standard excellence, not a literal or