In the Aryan race, the Vedic epoch, despite its sacerdotal ritualism, is considered as the period _par excellence_ of mythic efflorescence. "The myth," says Taine, "is not here (in the Vedas) a disguise, but an expression; no language is more true and more supple: it permits a glimpse of, or rather causes us to discern, the forms of mist, the movements of the air, change of seasons, all the accidents of sky, fire, storm: external nature has never found a mode of thought so graceful and flexible for reflecting itself thereby in all the inexhaustible variety of her appearances. However changeable nature may be, the imagination is equally so."[59] It animates everything--not only fire in general, _Agni_, but also the seven forms of flame, the wood that lights it, the ten fingers of the sacrificing priest, the prayer itself, and even the railing surrounding the altar. This is one example among many others. The partisans of the linguistic theory have been able to maintain that at this moment every word is a myth, because every word is a name designating a quality or an act, transformed by the imagination into substance. Max Mueller has translated a page of Hesiod, substituting the analytic, abstract, rational language of our time for the image-making names. Immediately, all the mythical material vanishes. Thus, "Selene kisses the sleeping Endymion" becomes the dry formula, "It is night." The most skilled linguists often declare themselves unable to change the pliant tongue of the imaginative age into our algebraic idioms.[60] Thought by imagery cannot remain itself and at the same time take on a rational dress. The mental state that marks the zenith of the free development of the imagination, is at present met with only in mystics and in some poets. Language has, however, preserved numerous vestiges of it in current expressions, the mythic signification of which has been lost--the sun rises, the sea is treacherous, the wind is mad, the earth is thirsty, etc. To this triumphant period there succeeds among the races that have made progress in evolution, i.e., that have been able to rise above the age of (pure) imagination, the period of waning, of regression, of decline. In order to understand it and perceive the how and why of it, let us first note that myths are reducible to two great categories: a. The explicative myths, arising from utility, from the necessity of knowing. _These undergo a radical transformation._ b. The non-explicative myths, resulting from a need of luxury, from a pure desire to create: these undergo only a _partial_ transformation. Let us follow them in the accomplishment of their destinies.