672 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to symbolism in order to enter into a more intimate communication 

 with the being or abstraction which it desires to approach. Hence 

 we everywhere see men either adopting natural or artificial ob- 

 jects that remind them of the great absent one ; imitating system- 

 atically the acts and gestures they assign to it ; or objectizing, by 

 processes as various as significant, all the shades of feeling which 

 it inspires in them, from the deepest humility to the most ardent 

 love. Hence the extreme diversity of symbols, which may be 

 divided into two classes, as they consist in acts or rites, or in 

 objects and emblems. "We shall occupy ourselves here with the 

 second category, or rather with the figured representations which 

 it has inspired, and which past generations have transmitted to us 

 as material vestiges of their faiths. Studies in comparative sym- 

 bology fell, toward the second half of the century, into a discredit 

 which is accounted for by their previous history. Syntheses pre- 

 mature as they were brilliant, built up with insufficient and defect- 

 ive materials by the rationalistic school, were succeeded, about 

 fifty years ago, by the system, more philosophical than historical, 

 which found, in all the religious practices of antiquity, the dis- 

 guised or transfigured reflection of a profound primitive wisdom. 

 These theories all having given way under the contradictions 

 brought against them by discoveries in archaeology, ethnography, 

 linguistics, etc., a reaction ensued as extreme as the former in- 

 fatuation. A disposition appeared to banish hypothesis entirely 

 from all research into the origin and significance of symbols ; as 

 if hypothesis — provided it is not treated as an assured fact — were 

 not an essential factor of all scientific progress. 



But the situation has greatly changed within thirty-five years. 

 Data permitting comparison under all desirable conditions of 

 authenticity, of the figured representations of different peoples, 

 have accumulated in such proportions that the principal obstacle 

 will lie hereafter in their multiplicity and dissemination. Exca- 

 vations of ancient monuments in Asia and Africa, the archaeologi- 

 cal collections of even the smallest states, the societies devoted to 

 every special branch of the subject, and the studies of the whole, 

 directed from the most varied points of view, have made the tasks 

 relatively easy of students who would follow the traces and eluci- 

 date the meaning of the principal symbols. On the other hand, 

 the deciphering of inscriptions, the classification and interpreta- 

 tion of written documents, and the general advance of history, of 

 religious history in particular, by informing us concerning the 

 beliefs of peoples, enable us the better to define the relation of 

 their symbols with their myths and their ceremonies, at the same 

 time that a more exact knowledge of the social and geographical 

 medium in which the symbols originated assists us in tracing the 

 origin of the images which have given body to the ideas. 



