severest of all.’[52] Auguste Comte also draws the same inferences from the tendency of Monotheism to develop a scientific conception of the world, and makes Monotheism and Scientific treatment exert a reciprocal influence on each other.[53] To which of these opposite deductions from the same premisses shall we hold? ‘Which is right?’ every educated man will ask, and immediately infer the inadequacy of such general characterisations, and the wide room thereby opened to arbitrariness and error, in case it should be attempted to erect upon them a history of civilisation or an ethnology. Now this foundation is exactly that on which Renan’s assumption of the absence of mythology from the Semites rests—an assumption which can by no means be admitted, first, because it is unhistorical; and secondly, because it would necessarily follow from it that race-distinctions differentiate the psychological bases of intellectual activity. ‘The Semites cannot form a myth,’ is a proposition the possibility of which could be allowed only if such an assertion as ‘This or that race has no digestive power, or no generative power,’ could be treated otherwise than as an _a priori_ absurdity. But it is even more remarkable that Renan, notwithstanding his conviction of the ‘uniform psychological constitution of the human race,’ in which he finds the justification of a common story of the Deluge springing up everywhere without borrowing,[54] and although he finds the gaps in the chronology of the antediluvian period of the Biblical history filled up, ‘par des noms d’anciens héros, et peut-être de divinités qu'on retrouve chez les autres peuples sémitiques,’[55] still speaks of the possibility, indeed of the necessity, that the Semitic race should be destitute of myths.