man’s origin. One is as good as another where all are irrational and beyond proof. But if he is, then the inquiry concerning him may not stop at the anatomy of his body and the assignment of his place in the succession of life on the globe. His relation, materially, to the simplest, shapeless specks of living matter; structurally, to the highest and more complex organisms, is demonstrated; the natural history of him is clear. This, however, is physical, and for us the larger question is psychical. The theory of evolution must embrace the genesis and development of mind, and therefore of ideas, beliefs, and speculations about things seen and unseen.

In the correction of our old definitions a wider meaning must be given to the word myth than that commonly found in the dictionaries. Opening any of these at random we find myth explained as fable, as something designedly fictitious, whether for amusement only, or to point a moral. The larger meaning which it holds to-day includes much more than this—to wit, the whole area of intellectual products which lie beyond the historic horizon and overlap it, effacing on nearer view the lines of separation. For the myth, as fable only, has no place for the crude fancies and grotesque imaginings of barbarous races of the present day, and of races at low levels of culture in the remote past. And so long as it was looked upon as the vagrant of fancy, with no serious meaning at the heart of it, and as corresponding to no yearning of man after the truth of things, sober treatment of it was impossible. But now that myth, with its prolific offspring, legend and tradition, is seen to be a necessary travailing through which the mind of man passed in its slow progress towards certitude, the study and comparison of its manifold, yet, at the centre, allied forms, and of the conditions out of which they arose, takes rank among the serious inquiries of our time.

Not that the inquiry is a new one. The limits of this book forbid detailed references to the successive stages of that inquiry—in other words, to the pre-Christian, patristic, and pseudo-scientific theories of myth which remained unchallenged, or varied only in non-essential features, till the rise of comparative mythology. But apology for such omission here is the less needful, since the list of ancient and modern vagaries would have the monotony of a catalogue. However unlike on the surface, they are fundamentally the same, being the products of non-critical ages, and one and all vitiated by assumptions concerning gods and men which are to us as “old wives’ fables.”

In short, between these empirical theories and the scientific method of inquiry into the meaning of myth there can be no relation. Because, for the assigning of its due place in the order of man’s mental and spiritual development to myth, there is needed that knowledge concerning his origin, concerning the conditions out of which he has emerged, and concerning the mythologies of lower races and their survival in unsuspected forms in the higher races, which was not only beyond reach, but also beyond conception, until this century.

Except, therefore, as curiosities of literature, we may dismiss the Lemprière of our school-days, and with him “Causabon”-Bryant and his symbolism of the ark and traces of the Flood in everything. Their keys, Arkite and Ophite, fit no lock, and with them we must, in all respect be it added, dismiss Mr. Gladstone, with his visions of the Messiah in Apollo, and of the Logos in Athênê.

The main design of this book is to show that in what is for convenience called myth lie the germs of philosophy, theology, and science, the beginnings of all knowledge that man has attained or ever will attain, and therefore that in myth we have his serious endeavour to interpret the meaning of his surroundings and of his own actions and feelings. In its unbroken sequence we have the explanation of his most cherished and now, for the most part, discredited beliefs, the persistence of which makes it essential and instructive not to deal with the primitive myth apart from its later and more complex phases. Myth was the product of man’s emotion and imagination, acted upon by his surroundings, and it carries the traces of its origin in its more developed forms, as the ancestral history of the higher organisms is embodied in their embryos. Man wondered before he reasoned. Awe and fear are quick to express themselves in rudimentary worship; hence the myth was at the outset a theology, and the gradations from personifying to deifying are too faint to be traced. Thus blended, the one as inevitable outcome of the other, they cannot well be treated separately, as if the myth were earth-born and the theology heaven-sent. And to treat them as one is to invade no province of religion, which is quite other than speculation about gods. The awe and reverence which the fathomless mystery of the universe awakens, which steal within us unbidden as the morning light, and unbroken on the prism of analysis; the conviction, deepening as we peer, that there is a Power beyond humanity, and upon which humanity depends; the feeling that life is in harmony with the Divine order when it moves in disinterested service of our kind—these theology can neither create nor destroy, neither verify nor disprove. They can be bound within no formula that man or church has invented, but undefined

“Are yet the fountain life of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing.”

At what epoch in man’s history we are to place the development of the myth-making faculty must remain undetermined. It is of course coincident with the dawn of thought. We cannot credit the nameless savage of the Ancient Stone Age with it. If he had brains and leisure enough to make guesses about things, he has left us no witness of the fact. His relics, and those of his successors to a period which is but as yesterday in the history of our kind, are material only; and not until we possess the symbols of his thought, whether in language or rude picture, do we get an inkling of the meaning which the universe had for him, in the details of his pitiless daily life, in the shapes and motions of surrounding objects, and in the majesty of the heavens above him. Even then the thought is more or less crystallised, and if we would watch it in the fluent form we must have a keen eye for the like process going on among savages yet untouched by the Time-spirit, although higher in the scale than the Papuans and hill tribes of the Vindhya. Although we cannot so far lull our faculty of thought as to realise the mental vacuity of the savage, we may, from survivals nowadays, lead up to reasonable guesses of savage ways of looking at things in bygone ages, and the more so when we can detect relics of these among the ignorant and superstitious of modern times.

What meaning, then, had man’s surroundings to him, when eye and ear could be diverted from prior claims of the body, and he could repose from watching for his prey, and from listening to the approach of wild beast or enemy? He had the advantage, from greater demand for their exercise, in keener senses of sight, hearing, smell, and touch, than we enjoy; nor did he fail to take in facts in plenty. But there was this vital defect and difference, that in his brains every fact was pigeon-holed, charged with its own narrow meaning only, as in small minds among ourselves we find place given to inane peddling details, and no advance made to general and wide conception of things. In sharpest contrast to the poet’s utterance:

“Nothing in this world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being