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Thus, if we say, "The head of a good classic is as full of ancient myths, as that of a servant-girl of ghost stories"; it is manifest that besides the fact asserted, there is an implied opinion respecting the small value of classical knowledge: and as this implied opinion is recognized much sooner than it can be put into words, there is gain in omitting it.
In addition to these spontaneous and anthropomorphic myths, which serve for the fanciful explanation of the system of the world, and the moral ideas of social and individual life, other myths arise which are not anthropomorphic, but which ascribe a substantial existence to abstract conceptions of physical, moral, or intellectual matters; conceptions necessary for the formulation of human speech.
It may seem strange that a definition of truth should have been based on the consideration of those ideas exclusively for which truth is not claimed by any critical person, such ideas, namely, as religious myths or the graphic and verbal machinery of science. Yet the fact is patent, and if we considered the matter historically it might not prove inexplicable.
One of the most elaborate of these was the embroidery on the royal robe. The pectoral was covered with scenes taken from Babylonian myths.
More fortunate than Rasselas, I found a happy spot where the names of women are never called, where the myths of Ate and Pandora are forgotten, and where the only females that have successfully run the rigid blockade are the tormenting fleas, that wage a ceaseless war with the unoffending men, and justify their nervous horror lest any other creature of the same sex should smuggle herself into their blissful retreat.
Myths are the religion of youth, and of primitive, unsophisticated nations; while science may be called the religion of the mature man, full of experience and immersed in the actual. The Positivism of Comte, like the old myth-worship, sets up for its deity human nature idealized, adorned with genius and virtue.
As the Incas increased in power they invented various myths to account for their origin. One of these traced their ancestry to the islands of Lake Titicaca. Finally the very location of Manco Ccapac's birthplace was forgotten by the common people although undoubtedly known to the priests and those who preserved the most sacred secrets of the Incas.
A curious anomaly still remains in Japan on the subject of liberty in study and belief. Though perfect liberty is the rule, one topic is even yet under official embargo. No one may express public dissent from the authorized version of primitive Japanese history. A few years ago a professor in the Imperial University made an attempt to interpret ancient Japanese myths.
In Curtin's "Introduction to Myths and Folk Tales of the Russians", he says: "I remember well the feeling roused in my mind at the mention or sight of the name Lucifer during the early years of my life. It stood for me as the name of a being stupendous, dreadful in moral deformity, lurid, hideous and mighty.
The suggestion is little more than a conjecture. 'Star Myths' points out that Greek myths of stars are a survival from the savage stage of fancy in which such stories are natural.
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