176 MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



peoples, such as the Aryans and their offshoots, 

 savages and partially civilized races, remained in 

 the early stages of this dialectic scale. Undoubtedly, 

 in our own race, the early religious conceptions which 

 constituted a simple worship of nature in various 

 forms were constantly becoming of purer character, 

 and they were not only exalted in their spiritual 

 quality, but in the Greek and Eoman religions they 

 attained to something like scientific precision. Yet 

 even in these higher aspirations the race did not 

 surrender its mythical faculty, to which it was 

 impelled by its physical and psychological constitu- 

 tion, and the pure conception was unconsciously over- 

 shadowed by symbolic ideas. We can plainly see how 

 far this symbolism, peculiar to the race, obscured 

 the minds of Plato and Aristotle, and of almost all 

 the subsequent philosophers. In the Semitic and 

 Chinese races this inner symbolism of the mind, with 

 reference to the interpretation of nature, was less 

 tenacious, intense, and productive, and they soon 

 freed themselves from their mental bonds in order 

 to rise to the conception of the absolute Being, 

 distinct from the world. When this idea had been 

 grasped by rude and popular intuition, men of the 

 highest intellectual power perfected the still confused 

 conception, and founded upon it science, civil and 

 political institutions, and national customs. 



' The idea of Christianity arose in the midst of 

 the Semitic people through him whose name it bears, 



