108 MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



peoples who have attained to an altogether anthropo- 

 morphic polytheism, either among the Aryans, prior 

 to their dispersion, in the Vedic period in India, 

 among the Celts, Gneco-Latins, Germans, Slavs, or 

 in the Finnish races, Mongols, Chinese, Assyrians, 

 Egyptians, Mexicans, and Peruvians, as well as among 

 the harbarous peoples of modern times. 



The imagination, the faculty which creates and 

 excites phantasms in man, is not, as is erroneously 

 supposed, the primary source of myths, hut only that 

 which in a secondary degree elaborates and perfects 

 their spontaneous forms ; and precisely because it is 

 near akin to this primordial mythical faculty, it goes 

 on to organize and classify these polytheistic myths. 

 By a moral and necessary development an approxi- 

 mation is made, if not to truth itself, at any rate to 

 its symbols ; whence reason is afterwards more easily 

 infused into myth on the one side, and on the other 

 it is resolved into rational ideas and cosmic laws. 

 It was in this way that poets perfected myth in 

 its influence on virtue and civilization, and by 

 them it was directed into the paths of science and of 

 truth. 



As Dr. Zeller has w r ell said in his lecture on the 

 development of monotheism in Greece herself, the 

 great Greek poets were her first thinkers, her sages, 

 as they were afterwards called. They sang of Zeus, 

 and exalted him as the defender of righteousness, the 

 representative of moral order. Archilocus says that 



