4 COSMOS. 



necessary to observe even stricter limits. The boundless 

 domain of the world of thought, enriched for thousands of 

 years by the vigorous force of intellectual activity, exhibits, 

 among different races of men, and in different stages of 

 civilization, sometimes a joyous, sometimes a melancholy tone 

 of mind ; 2 sometimes a delicate appreciation of the beautiful, 

 sometimes an apathetic insensibility. The mind of man is 

 first led to adore the forces of nature and certain objects of 

 the material world ; at a later period it yields to religious 

 impulses of a higher and purely spiritual character. 3 The 

 inner reflex of the outer world exerts the most varied 

 influence on the mysterious process of the formation of 

 language, 4 in which the original corporeal tendencies, as well 

 as the impressions of surrounding nature, act as powerful 

 concurring elements. Man elaborates within himself the 

 materials presented to him by the senses, and the products 

 of this spiritual labour belong as essentially to the domain of 

 the COSMOS as do the phenomena of the external world. 



As a reflected image of Nature, influenced by the crea- 

 tions of excited imagination, cannot retain its truthful purity, 

 there has arisen besides the actual and external world, an 

 ideal and internal world, full of fantastic, and partly sym- 

 bolical myths, heightened by the introduction of fabulous 

 animal forms, whose several parts are derived from the 

 organisms of the present world, and sometimes even from the 

 relics of extinct species. 5 Marvellous flowers and trees spring 

 from this mythic soil, as the giant ash of the Edda-Songs, 



2 Cosmos, vol. i. pp. 3-5 ; vol. ii. pp. 376 and 456. 



3 Ibid., vol. ii. pp. 392-396, and 411-415. 



4 Ibid., vol. i. pp. 366-369 ; vol. ii. pp. 473-473. 



6 M. von Olfer's Ueberreste vonveltlicher Riesenthiere in 

 Beziehung auf Ostasiatische Sagen in the Abh. der Berl. Akad., 

 1832, s. 51. On the opinion advanced by Empedocles 

 regarding the cause of the extinction of the earliest animal 

 forms, see Hegel's Geschichte der Philosophie, bd. ii. s. 344. 



