370 CONCLUDING REMARKS. 



tices handed down from age to age so much has been said in 

 this book, may perhaps not be fully or exactly represented in 

 the mental state of any living tribe of men. 



There have been indeed few more important movements in 

 the course of the history of mankind, than this change of opi- 

 nion as to the nature and relations of what is in the mind and 

 what is out of it. To say nothing of its vast effects upon 

 Ethics and Religion, the whole course of Science, and of Art, 

 of which Science is a principal element, have been deeply in- 

 fluenced by this mental change. Man^s views of the difference 

 between imagination and reality, of the nature of cause and 

 effect, of the connexion between himself and the external world, 

 and of the parts of the external world among themselves, have 

 been entirely altered by it. To the times before this movement 

 had gone too far, belong the developments of Mythology, so 

 puzzling to later ages which had risen to a higher mental 

 state, and had then thrown down the ladder they had climbed 

 by. The modern deciphering of ancient myths has been per- 

 haps more valuable than any direct examination of savage 

 races, in giving us the means of realizing that early state of 

 mind in which there is scarcely any distinct barrier between 

 fact and fancy, — to which whatever is similar is the same. If 

 the clouds are driven across the sky like cows from their pas- 

 ture, they are not merely compared to cows, but are thought 

 and talked of as though they really were cows ; if the sun 

 travels along its course like a glittering chariot, forthwith the 

 wheels and the driver and the horses are there ; while by treat- 

 ing a name as though it necessarily represented a person, it 

 becomes possible to evolve out of the contemplation of nature 

 those wonderful stories in which even the earth, the sea, and 

 the sky, combine with their natural attributes a kind of half- 

 human personality. The opinion that dreams and phantasms 

 have an objective existence out of the mind that perceives 

 themij and that when two ideas are associated in a man's mind 

 the objects to which those ideas belong must have a corre- 

 sponding physical connexion, are views over which the long- 

 course of observation and study of nature has brought a vast 

 change. These things belong to that early condition of the 



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