many challenges to action, so many conditions for some glorious
unthought-of victory. Such a religion is indeed profoundly ignorant, it
is the religion of inexperience, yet it has, at its core, the very
spirit of life. Its error is only to consider the will omnipotent and
sacred and not to distinguish the field of inevitable failure from that
of possible success. Success, however, would never be possible without
that fund of energy and that latent resolve and determination which
bring also faith in success. Animal optimism is a great renovator and
disinfectant in the world.

[Sidenote: Its emancipation from Christianity.]

It was this youthful religion--profound, barbaric, poetical--that the
Teutonic races insinuated into Christianity and substituted for that
last sigh of two expiring worlds. In the end, with the complete
crumbling away of Christian dogma and tradition, Absolute Egotism
appeared openly on the surface in the shape of German speculative
philosophy. This form, which Protestantism assumed at a moment of high
tension and reckless self-sufficiency, it will doubtless shed in turn
and take on new expressions; but that declaration of independence on the
part of the Teutonic spirit marks emphatically its exit from
Christianity and the end of that series of transformations in which it
took the Bible and patristic dogma for its materials. It now bids fair
to apply itself instead to social life and natural science and to
attempt to feed its Protean hunger directly from these more homely
sources.

CHAPTER VIII

CONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH

[Sidenote: Myth should dissolve with the advance of science.]

That magic and mythology have no experimental sanction is clear so soon
as experience begins to be gathered together with any care. As magic
attempts to do work by incantations, so myth tries to attain knowledge
by playing with lies. The attempt is in the first instance inevitable
and even innocent, for it takes time to discriminate valid from
valueless fancies in a mind in which they spring up together, with no
intrinsic mark to distinguish them. The idle notion attracts attention
no less than the one destined to prove significant; often it pleases
more. Only watchful eyes and that rare thing, conscience applied to
memory, can pluck working notions from the gay and lascivious vegetation
of the mind, or learn to prefer Cinderella to her impudent sisters. If a
myth has some modicum of applicabi