Why this should be the case is another point about which learned men have had many opinions. Some of them have thought that the whole human race must once have lived in one particular spot on the globe, and that from there large numbers wandered forth to seek new homes in all the other countries on the globe, taking with them the myths which they had in common when they all lived together. It has never been settled just where that particular spot was, and probably it never will be. Perhaps it was in Central Asia, perhaps it was in the southern part of Spain, perhaps in Norway and Sweden, perhaps in the island of Atlantis, in the Southern Seas, which a legend says was submerged ages and ages ago. All of these places have been suggested as the original home of the whole human race, and very good arguments have been brought forward to prove the truth of every one of these suggestions. Since it does not seem possible to find out the truth about this, there are other people who dismiss the idea altogether. They think that man and nature being a good deal alike in whatever part of the world you find them, it is highly probable that myths might resemble each other very strikingly and yet be invented independently by people living in lands far apart, while the differences would be due largely to climate. Now if we try to think of centuries of time going by until in many countries primitive man is no longer primitive but begins to be more civilized, we shall find that certain groups of myths became crystallized into complete religious systems, such as existed in Egypt, Assyria, India, Greece, Persia, and many other countries. By this time the human race had attained to a much greater degree of self-consciousness. Men were beginning to understand both themselves and nature better, and they often could see the true causes for the events of nature going on about them. The next step was for them to begin to observe very carefully the systems of religious myths which had been handed down to them by their forefathers. Upon these they used their imaginative faculty, as man had earlier used it upon nature itself, with the result that they attached new meanings and gave fresh explanations of myths which had originally started as simple personifications of nature. In Greece, for example, Apollo, who was originally a personification of the sun, came to be regarded as the God of Music and Poetry; Athēne, who was originally the Dawn, became the Goddess of Wisdom; Hermes, originally the Wind, became the God of Eloquence and the leader of spirits. This is the way myths gradually grew to have philosophical or metaphysical meanings—that is, to stand as symbols of the deepest and most far-reaching thoughts of which the mind of man at that time was capable. Many of those thoughts are so profound and so wonderful that one needs to have a great deal of knowledge to understand them. All that interests you now is to know that