236 MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



Measure, weight, and proportion were applied to 

 all celestial and terrestrial phenomena, and physics, 

 chemistry, and all the organic sciences became the 

 manifestation of facts, of observed and calculated laws, 

 arranged in a natural order, and in this way an 

 immense advance was made in all branches of science. 

 The history of mankind, first regarded as the arbitrary 

 arrangement of a superior being, as it was formulated 

 in the teaching of Judaism and Christianity, had its 

 own laws in the facts of which it consisted, and thus 

 the mythical conception which endowed it with 

 personal life was dissolved. The origin of things was 

 explained by this method of observation, and by these 

 positive conceptions ; the records which had hitherto 

 been regarded as a divine, extrinsic revelation came to 

 be considered as simple documents, in which truth 

 was to be separated from the myth which obscured 

 and encompassed it. So by degrees, from fact to fact, 

 from analysis to analysis, by observation, experiment, 

 and decomposition, the rational, mechanical explana- 

 tion arose and gathered strength. The generation of 

 things, the variety of phenomena and their order, 

 were derived from the primitive chemical atom, and 

 from the various changes of form and rapidity of 

 motion to which they are subjected. The old con- 

 ception of atoms, which had never been forgotten, and 

 which had unconsciously swayed and influenced the 

 minds of men, reappears ; but it reappears transformed 

 by observation, by weight and measure and experi- 



