of Edinburgh, Session 1869 - 70 . 
45 
craft, and prevented them from looking on a rich and various 
subject with that many-sided sympathy and catholic receptiveness 
which it required. In fact, some of our most recent writers on 
this subject have not advanced a single step, in respect of scientific 
method, beyond Jacob Bryant, unquestionably the most learned 
and original speculator on mythology of the last century; hut 
whose great work, nevertheless, can only be compared to a grand 
chase in the dark, with a few bright flashes of discovery, and 
happy gleams of suggestion by the way. For these reasons, and 
to make a necessary protest against certain ingenious aberrations of 
Max Muller, Gladstone, Inman, and Cox in the method of mytho¬ 
logical interpretation, he had undertaken to read the present paper; 
which, if it possessed only the negative virtue of warning people 
to be sober-minded and cautious when entering on a path of in¬ 
quiry, full of bogs below and clouds above, could not be deemed 
impertinent at the present moment. 
One great fact as to the origin of Polytheism may be considered 
as firmly established, and by general consent admitted—viz., that 
the great physical shows and forces by which man finds himself 
surrounded and conditioned, assuming, under the influence of 
reverence and imagination, various anthropomorphic disguises, 
constituted the original council of the great gods. When we say 
physical, however, we do not mean physical in the material and 
mechanical modern sense of the word; but we mean physical in a 
sort of pantheistic sense, in which nature is regarded as everywhere 
interpenetrated, inspired, and fashioned by spirit. This being so 
and ascertained, be it noted, by an overwhelming array of strictly 
inductive evidence, there can be no difficulty in predicating, d 
priori , what the great gods of the Greeks, to whom I shall confine 
myself in this paper, must have been originally in their elemental 
significance. They must have been those powers of Nature and of 
the human soul, or of Nature considered as animated by a human 
soul, whose display was most striking, and whose influence was 
most felt by primeval man. Those powers are—The sky, the 
earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the sea and rivers, the atmo¬ 
sphere and winds, the subterranean forces, the underground world, 
and the unseen powers of darkness beyond the grave, the vege¬ 
tative or generative principle, the fervid domain of moral emotions, 
