The word _conscious_, like _consciousness_, was unknown until the seventeenth century, when its newfangledness was ridiculed by Ben Jonson. It is odd, therefore, that the first recorded uses are figurative, applying it to inanimate objects. When we find Denham writing in 1643: Thence to the coverts and the conscious Groves, The scenes of his past Triumphs and his Loves.... and Milton a few years later: So all ere day-spring, under conscious Night Secret they finishèd.... we can almost fancy, by their readiness to seize upon the new word, that our poets were beginning, even so soon, to feel the need of restoring “subjectively” to external Nature—of “projecting into” her, as we can now say—a fanciful substitute for that voluntary life and inner connection with human affairs which Descartes and Hobbes were draining from her in reality. The tendency we can see here, carried to extravagant lengths, at last produced the extraordinary poetic conventions of the eighteenth century, by which fictitious personality was attributed to every object and idea under the sun. Finally the complicated machinery of classical mythology was applied in the same subjective and purely fanciful way to English society and the English countryside. It is in the same Windsor Forest that we are asked to See Pan with flocks, with fruits Pomona crowned, Here blushing Flora paints the enamel’d ground, Here Ceres’ gifts in waving prospect stand, And nodding tempt the joyful reaper’s hand. At first sight this state of affairs looks like an exact repetition of the later stages of Roman mythology, but in point of fact the two outlooks are sharply distinguished by the new element of self-consciousness. Myth was in some way in the blood of the Romans; it was a living part of their national history, and in spite of all their artificiality and scepticism there is no evidence that they ever deliberately created gods and goddesses of the fancy, in whom they neither believed themselves nor expected anyone else to believe. We imagine them incapable of grasping, for instance, such an idea as that which found expression in the brand-new eighteenth-century verb, to _personify_. One wonders, therefore, to what extent the dawn of a mechanical age was reflecting itself in this new outlook, this new cosmos controlled by dead laws rather than instinct with living spirit, and therefore requiring to be peopled by the fancy.