HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF MYTH AND SCIENCE. 193 



This extract from a work published many years 

 ago, seems to me to confirm the theory of myths 

 which 1 have explained ; it shows how they are ulti- 

 mately fused into a simple form, in conformity with 

 the ideas of civilized society, and it will also throw 

 light on what is to follow. 



If we consider the primitive genesis and evolution 

 of myth, confirmed by all the facts of history and 

 ethnography, it will appear that although the matter 

 on which thought was exercised was mythical and 

 fanciful, the form and organizing method were the 

 same as those of science. It is, in fact, a scientific 

 process to observe, spontaneously at first, and then 

 deliberately, the points of likeness and unlikeness 

 between special objects of perception ; we must rise 

 from the particular to the general, from the individual 

 to the species, thus ever enlarging the circle of obser- 

 vation, in order to arrive at types, laws, and ultimate 

 unity, or at least a unity supposed to be ultimate, to 

 which everything is reduced. So that the mythical 

 faculty of thought was scientific in its logical form, 

 and was exercised in the same way as the scientific 

 faculty. 



But science does not merely consist in the sys- 



development, under the name of Nazarencs or Ebionites. In the fourth 

 century, Epiphanius and Jerome found these primitive Christians 

 constant to the old dogma, while Aryan Christianity had made 

 gigantic strides, both in its ideas and social organization. Among 

 the Semites, even when they have partially accepted the dogma, it was 

 and is unproductive. 



