A simple uninstructed age believes its own legend; it asks no question upon the point of credibility; with such an age, to hear, is to believe. Originally, indeed, with all of us, to have a conception of any thing is tantamount to believing that it exists, or has existed: belief is no separate act of mind, but is itself included in the perception or the thought; it is experience and reflection which have to ingraft their _disbelief_, and teach us that every thing we _think_ is not equally _true_. An ignorant people are all children, and with them there is but one rule of faith: the more vivid the impression, the stronger the belief,--the more marvellous the story, the less possibility of doubting it. And consider this--that we, owing to our scientific habits of thought, and the long record of the by-gone world which lies open to us, entertain it as a general law, that the past has, in certain essentials, resembled the present; but our unlettered people, looking out into the blank foretime, would have no such law to regulate or restrain their belief. On the contrary, their impression would naturally be, that the past was, essentially different from the present, or why was it _past_? Why all this change and transiency, if the same things were to be repeated? All people that have had no records have filled up the void with beings and events as unlike as possible to those they were familiar with. They had a prevailing impression that that blank space was the region of the wonderful; and the day-dreamer, the imaginative man, who was, naturally enough, proclaimed to be inspired, since none could tell how his knowledge came, was generally at hand to fill up the blank space with appropriate picture.