We must not allow ourselves to be misled by metaphors about “the childhood of the race,” though even these, if properly understood, are suggestive enough. Our ideas of the true state of a child’s mind are apt to be coloured by that theory of antenatal existence which has found, perhaps, its highest expression in Wordsworth’s _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_. We transfer these ideas to the race generally, and are thus led to think of the men who made and repeated myths as simple, innocent creatures who were somehow nearer than we are to the beginning of things, and so, perhaps, saw with a clearer vision. A truer view of what a child’s thoughts really are will help to put us on the right track. Left to themselves, children are often tormented by vague terrors of surrounding objects which they fear to confide to any one. Their games are based upon an animistic theory of things, and they are great believers in luck and in the lot. They are devotees, too, of that “cult of odds and ends” which is fetishism; and the unsightly old dolls which they often cherish more fondly than the choicest products of the toy-shop, remind us forcibly of the ungainly stocks and stones which Pausanias found in the Holy of Holies of many a stately Greek temple. At Sparta the Tyndaridai were a couple of boards, while the old image of Hera at Samos was a roughly-hewn log.[2] Footnote 2: See E. Meyer, _Gesch. des Alterth._ ii. § 64; Menzies, _History of Religion_, pp. 272-276. On the other hand, we must remember that, even in the earliest times of which we have any record, the world was already very old. Those Greeks who first tried to understand nature were not at all in the position of men setting out on a hitherto untrodden path. There was already in the field a tolerably consistent view of the world, though no doubt it was rather implied and assumed in ritual and myth than distinctly realised as such. The early thinkers did a far greater thing than merely to make a beginning. By turning their backs on the savage view of things, they renewed their youth, and with it, as it proved, the youth of the world, at a time when the world seemed in its dotage. The marvel is that they were able to do this so thoroughly as they did. A savage myth might be preserved here and there to the scandal of philosophers; fetishes, totems, and magic rites might lurk in holes and corners with the moles and with the bats, to be unearthed long afterwards by the curious in such matters. But the all-pervading superstition, which we call primitive because we know not how or whence it came, was gone for ever; and we find Herodotos noting with unfeigned surprise the existence among “barbarians” of beliefs and customs which, not so long ago, his own forefathers had taught and practised quite as zealously as ever did Libyan or Scyth. Even then, he might have found most of them surviving on the “high places” of Hellas. [Sidenote: Traces of the primitive view in early literature.]