POWELL] SOPHIOLOGY CLXXIII 



MYTHOLOGY 



Heretofore in treating of the fundanieiital ])rocesses of psy- 

 chology the nature of consciousness, inference, and verification 

 have been set forth. Inference alone may and often does 

 result in error, while truth is assured only by verification. 

 Every judgment involves a consciousness and an infei'ence ; 

 and if the judgment is valid, its validity can be established and 

 known only by verification. The repetition of an erroneous 

 judgment is often confounded with verification, and thus men 

 come to believe in fallacies. Of the multitude of errors in judg- 

 ment those most often repeated by mankind, and especially 

 those which have been coined by the leaders of thought, are 

 those which are woven into mythology. Though we have a 

 criterion by which to distinguish true from erroneous judg- 

 ments, still judgments are compounded into notions that 

 ultimately are exceedingly complex, and it is often found diffi- 

 cult to resolve notions into their constituent judgments; so that 

 while there is an infallible criterion, it is not easily applied. 

 We are not here dealing with the whole subject of psychology, 

 but only with the leading concepts which distinguish science 

 from mytholog)'. That history of opinions which is often 

 called the history of philosophy (but which is mainly the 

 history of metaphysic), together with the history of science, 

 gives us the data of what is here called sopliiologii. Science 

 has already cost a vast amount of research, and we ma}' safely 

 prophesy that only a beginning has been made. It would be 

 an inane proceeding to attempt to forecast what research will 

 ultimately unfold, but perhaps it would not be unprofitable to 

 review in outline the characteristics of the fundamental errors 

 of mankind in so far as they have already been detected. 



False inferences primarily arise through referring sense 

 impressions to wrong causes. A term is needed for this error, 

 and it will be called imputation. Imputation, then, is the ref- 

 erence of a sense impression of which the mind is conscious 

 as an effect, to a mistaken cause. This wrong cause may be 

 a wrong body or it may be a wrong property. 



