234: MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



intellect which formulated the conception was the 

 only real thing. In virtue of the faculty of entifica- 

 tion, onty the mind and its ideas were real, the world 

 and all which it contained had a doubtful existence.. 

 This tendency had its ultimate expression in Fichte, 

 who created the universe by means of the Ego, thus 

 transforming the earlier objective myth into one 

 which was wonderfully subjective. Descartes doubted 

 about everything beyond the range of his own thought, 

 and was the first to overthrow the former ideal 

 realism, and to lead the way to science, and to more 

 rational analysis. To him the teaching of Spinoza 

 and Kant was really due, as well as the English 

 schools which had so much to do with the destruction 

 of the earlier mythical edifice of ideas. 



But, as I have already observed, if this great 

 rational progress were important on the one side, on 

 the other it produced a more spiritualized form of 

 myth, namely the subjective, which became still more 

 powerful in the philosophy of Kant. "While some 

 thinkers sought to resolve and dissolve the objective 

 myth, they did it in such a way as to add strength to 

 the subjective form, of myth and science, for which 

 Descartes had prepared the way; the theory of 

 Spinoza and of the German school in general 

 fundamentally consists in the substitution of entified 

 forms and dialectics of the rnind for the earlier 

 objective forms of ideas. A great error was rectified, 

 and the former phase of the intellectual evolution 



