310 NATURE MYTHS AND ALLEGORIES 



and the verse of the future may yet produce monumental 

 embodiments of vices and of virtues, through familiarity with 

 which posterity will sensibly learn how awful in ugliness are 

 the one kind, how awful in beauty are the other. What 

 right, moreover, have we, after all is said and done, to deny 

 that each collective vice and each collective virtue of humanity 

 may be a spiritual entity a something corresponding to 

 demonic or angelic essences ? It is difficult to see that any 

 harm should come to us, even though we submitted to regard 

 them as living potencies influencing mankind. 



VI 



Such speculations border the abyss of mysticism, and 

 require a more minute development than I can give them 

 here. It will be well in conclusion to recapitulate the points 

 wherein nature myths and allegory myths differ, and the 

 points they have in common. 



The nature myth extracts spirit from the external world, 

 and invests that spirit with human personality in forms 

 appropriate to the impression made upon the human mind 

 by each particular object. The allegorical myth abstracts 

 from the human soul specific qualities, contemplates these as 

 objects, and while doing so is forced to provide them with 

 physical embodiments and personalities corresponding to their 

 spiritual essence. Man, so long as he is man, cannot think a 

 person except as both body and spirit. He cannot idealise 

 his own spiritual properties except as embodied. He cannot 

 detach the spirit he feels in tree or flower except as em- 

 bodied. His reason may assure him that this is a delusion. 

 Both Christianity and science may warn him off that path of 

 so-called falsehood. Christianity, indeed, by its lore of angels 

 and devils, has accepted the principle of allegorical myths, 

 while it rejects the nature myths as pagan. Science bids us 

 cast both aside, and in so far is more logical. Where Christi- 

 anity and science agree in condemning nature myths, they 

 do so at the expense of making men deaf and blind to the 

 inherent spirituality of the universe. All through the Middle 



