HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF MYTH AND SCIENCE. 235 



of myth disappeared, in favour of another which, 

 although still erroneous, was more rational and 

 independent. 



The subjective and still mythical representations, 

 either of the mind or of external objects, were after- 

 wards reduced to true science by positive and experi- 

 mental methods, aided by instruments, and confirmed 

 by the discoveries of Galileo and of his disciples 

 throughout the civilized world. He was in modern 

 times another great factor of the dissolution of myth, 

 so far as it is definitive. Nature was made subordinate 

 to weight and measure, and to their mathematical and 

 mechanical proportions in various phenomena ; these 

 were deduced from experiment and the use of instru- 

 ments, the factors which in the hands of Galileo and 

 his great successors in all civilized nations, destroyed 

 and are still destroying the old mythical conception of 

 the world. In astronomy they overthrew the catholic 

 tenet of the geocentric constitution of the heavens ; 

 they shattered the spheres in which they were confined, 

 opened infinite space, and peopled it with an infinite 

 number of stars, and in the attraction of gravity they 

 discovered the universal law of motion in the firma- 

 ment. Thus all the mythical representations of the 

 system of the world, whether Aristotelian, Ptolemaic, 

 or Biblical, vanished for ever, and the great zoomor- 

 phic body of the universe was dissolved; to be 

 replaced by worlds circulating in infinite space, sub- 

 ject to the laws of number and of geometry. 



