l vitality; but it is no _vehicle_ for experience; it
cannot serve the purposes of transitive thought or action. Science, on
the other hand, is constituted by those fancies which, arising like
myths out of perception, retain a sensuous language and point to further
perceptions of the same kind; so that the suggestions drawn from one
object perceived are only ideas of other objects similarly perceptible.
A scientific hypothesis is one which represents something continuous
with the observed facts and conceivably existent in the same medium.
Science is a bridge touching experience at both ends, over which
practical thought may travel from act to act, from perception to
perception.

[Sidenote: But myth is confused with the moral values it expresses.]

To separate fable from knowledge nothing is therefore requisite except
close scrutiny and the principle of parsimony. Were mythology merely a
poetic substitute for natural science the advance of science would
sufficiently dispose of it. What remained over would, like the myths in
Plato, be at least better than total silence on a subject that interests
us and makes us think, although we have no means of testing our thoughts
in its regard. But the chief source of perplexity and confusion in
mythology is its confusion with moral truth. The myth which originally
was but a symbol substituted for empirical descriptions becomes in the
sequel an idol substituted for ideal values. This complication, from
which half the troubles of philosophy arise, deserves our careful
attention.

European history has now come twice upon the dissolution of mythologies,
first among the Stoics and then among the Protestants. The circumstances
in the two cases were very unlike; so were the mythical systems that
were discarded; and yet the issue was in both instances similar. Greek
and Christian mythology have alike ended in pantheism. So soon as the
constructions of the poets and the Fathers were seen to be ingenious
fictions, criticism was confronted with an obvious duty: to break up the
mythical compound furnished by tradition into its elements, putting on
one side what natural observation or actual history had supplied, and on
the other what dramatic imagination had added. For a cool and
disinterested observer the task, where evidence and records were not
wanting, would be simple enough. But the critic in this case would not
usually be cool or disinterested. His religion was concerned; he had no
oth