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Updated: May 5, 2025
But to explain the origin of an attitude is not to explain it away. May it not be that these sentiments can be given another setting and other objects? While all races have passed through this myth-making stage, certain races have been more gifted, or else more favored by the circumstances of their development.
Here it is that Catholic Christianity stands out as altogether catholic and human, adapted as it is to the world-wide cravings of the religious instinct; satisfying the imagination and the emotions, no less than the intellect and the will; and yet saving us from the perils of the myth-making tendency of our mind.
Intercourse with Nature I mean intellectual intercourse, not merely the emotional intercourse of the sailor or explorer or farmer tends to beget a habit of mind the farthest possible removed from the myth-making, the vision-seeing, the voice-hearing habit and temper.
Once religion is established, and the myth-making capacity let loose, additions are made that are due to all sorts of causes. The Romans and Greeks, for example, seem to have created a number of deities out of pure abstractions gods of peace, of war, of fortune, and so forth.
We are keenly appreciative of the power exercised by the myth-making faculty in the past, but as applied to early physicians, we suggest that the suspicion may easily be too active.
Life is a current in opposition to matter which it enters into, and organizes into the myriads of living forms. I confess that it is easier for me to think of life in these terms than in terms of physical science. The view falls in better with our anthropomorphic tendencies. It appeals to the imagination and to our myth-making aptitudes. It gives a dramatic interest to the question.
It is the Sheol of the old Hebrews, a misty region below the surface of the earth; it is the Hades of the Greeks, the place of the departed shades; it is the Avernus of the Romans, the lower regions where ghosts flit and gibber. This place of the dead is at first the grave and sinks deeper into the earth as time passes and the myth-making fancy has been directed upon it.
Rather, it would appear that at this point a part of the human race plunged into a new era of myth-making and fetish worship the homage to the fetish of law. Even the great minds do not altogether escape. 'Fact I know and law I know, says Huxley, with a faint suggestion of sacred rhetoric. But surely we do not know law in the same sense in which we know fact.
The city-dweller of to-day lives in a subdued and mechanically controlled region whose every clank and rattle speaks of routine and order. The myth-making faculty of the street-urchin has little to feed upon all is so obvious and open to inspection.
The feelings with which the myth-making age contemplated the thunder-shower as it revived the earth paralyzed by a long drought, are shown in the myth of Oidipous. The Sphinx, whose name signifies "the one who binds," is the demon who sits on the cloud-rock and imprisons the rain, muttering, dark sayings which none but the all-knowing sun may understand.
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