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He was the first who attempted a logical solution of material phenomena, without resorting to mythical representations. Thales felt that there was a grand question to be answered relative to the beginning of things. "Philosophy," it has been well said, "may be a history of errors, but not of follies" It was not a folly, in a rude age, to speculate on the first or fundamental principle of things.
However, it has faded so far into the dim realms of the past that it seems almost mythical. The bear has stood for all that is dangerous and horrible for ages. No doubt, our ancestral experiences with the cave bears of Europe stamped the dread of these mighty beasts indelibly in our hearts.
I strove to comfort her, telling her mythical tales of surgical reassurances. She shook her head sadly. "It was like you to stay in Berlin, Simon," she said, after a while. "Although they wouldn't let me see you, yet I knew you were within call. You can't conceive what a comfort it has been." "How could I leave you, dear," said I, "with the thought of you throbbing in my head night and day?"
Suppression of menstruation is brought about in many peculiar ways, and sometimes by the slightest of causes, some authentic instances being so strange as to seem mythical. Through the Ephemerides we constantly read of such causes as contact with a corpse, the sight of a serpent or mouse, the sight of monsters, etc. Lightning stroke and curious neuroses have been reported as causes.
In fact, the mythical ideas of spirits, and the fanciful place they took in the primitive idea of the world, produced the custom of burying corpses in an upright, stooping, or sitting position, and their situation with reference to the four cardinal points.
In determining why such adverse sentiments were entertained towards religion by "the wiser part of mankind," about the time referred to in the foregoing quotations, it will be found to have been owing to the extensive spread of the Esoteric philosophy, which taught, as previously stated, that the gods were mythical and the scriptures allegorical.
As this idea, and this practice, were the foundations whereon the superstructure of alchemy was raised, I think it is important to amplify them more fully than I have done already. Mention is made in many alchemical writings of a mythical personage named Hermes Trismegistus, who is said to have lived a little later than the time of Moses.
Moreover, Heaven to him was no longer a vague, mythical realm, ill-defined by the prosy descriptions of church-preachers, it was an actual WORLD to which HE was linked, in which HE had possessions, of which HE was a native, and for the perpetuation and enlargement of whose splendor ALL worlds existed!
We have now to learn how much of this knowledge was lost or perverted how geography, for a time, lost the character of a science, and became once more the subject of mythical fancies similar to those which we found in its earliest stages.
But if truth, pure, abstract, and free from anything of a mythical nature, is always to remain unattainable by us all, philosophers included, it might be compared to fluorine, which cannot be presented by itself alone, but only when combined with other stuffs.
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