NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 307 



has put on the multiplicity of human attributes. Therefore 

 we obtain the complex deities called Pallas, Herakles, and 

 Aphrodite. The main abstraction to which they owe exist- 

 ence persists in them, and dominates their doings ; but in the 

 legends told about them other moral elements appear. The 

 fables of Pallas, Herakles, and Aphrodite teach how humanity 

 on a colossal scale, swayed severally by laws of wisdom, 

 strength, and beauty, will behave under conditions similar to 

 those of our experience what their vigour and their frailty 

 are, to what temptations they are subject, what special 

 advantages they enjoy, and what distinctive functions they 

 perform. Studying these moral qualities abstracted and 

 incarnate in the allegory or the god, man learns to compre- 

 hend their influences clearly, to recognise his own proclivities 

 and addictions with precision, to submit to those which attract 

 him, to shrink from those which repel. 



There is an ideal truth in allegory of this kind ; and the 

 physical types which artists and poets have created to express 

 it are not fortuitous. We have, indeed, never seen a person 

 wholly wise, or wholly strong, or wholly beautiful. Yet the 

 thoughts of wisdom, strength, and beauty are present to us ; 

 and if these could take shape as human persons, they would 

 find a body corresponding to their spiritual essence. 



To return to the paganism which worshipped these abstrac- 

 tions as deities would be impossible, and if it were possible it 

 would be undesirable. Until proof be gained of intermediate 

 gods, of angels and devils, of planetary powers and genii, we 

 do not need to hold the creations of our mind in superstitious 

 awe. Yet surely our moral life would be richer, our sense of 

 spiritual potencies would be more vivid, if we were in the 

 habit of inculcating lessons of conduct and discriminating the 

 several types to which we may assimilate ourselves by some 

 such striking examples as polytheism held up for imitation 

 and avoidance. The devotion of Hippolytus to Artemis was 

 not a vain thing ; nor was the need Orestes felt for purifica- 

 tion before his mother's Furies an idle fancy. To answer that 

 Artemis and the Furies were but the figments of antique 

 sages and poets avails little, for who shall contend that the 



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