HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF MYTH AND SCIENCE. 237 



ment, and it has become a science instead of a 

 simple speculation. The atomistic evolution of the 

 ancients, accepted by one school of speculative 

 thought, which sought to overthrow the mythical 

 representation of the world, was only an isolated 

 anticipation of a few philosophers; it has now 

 become a scientific evolution, common to all modern 

 civilization. The theory of descent, transformation, 

 and the general evolution of species, followed as a 

 necessary corollary and immediate result of the 

 dissolution of Plato's mythical conception of specific 

 ideas, and of all the generic but material personifica- 

 tions with which nature had been peopled. When 

 such conceptions of the ideal world were dissipated, 

 those of the actual world of nature soon followed, and 

 this de-personification of natural, mythical species in 

 the vast organic kingdom is one of the most splendid 

 intellectual achievements of the age. 



This victory of the natural sciences has reacted on 

 those which are psychological, and on the theory of 

 the mind, and has subjected them to the necessities and 

 form of this new phase of the evolution of thought. 

 The subjective had been substituted for the objective 

 myth and had created the forms of mind, its logical 

 laws and intrinsic process, the objective synthesis of 

 the world, and it was now influenced by the stupendous 

 discoveries and analyses of other sciences, so that 

 psychology was in its turn transformed into a science, 

 not only of observation, but of experiment. Measure, 



