The Myth is converted either into Religion or into History; the figures of the myth become either Gods and god-born Heroes, or Ancestors of the nation to which the myth belonged. What part of the myth cannot be converted, or has not been converted, into religion, and what has ceased to be religious without ceasing to exist in the popular mind, is converted into history; for all that remains in the human consciousness as a living portion of it must have a distinct impress; no meaningless vegetating is possible. Nothing is without an impressed form; when an old impress has lost its meaning, a new one is made. It is these new impressions that keep the elements of the ancient myth alive in the mind of the people far beyond the mythical age. Among the Hebrews this new force worked more powerfully than elsewhere in changing the form and impress of the still living elements of the myth, converting almost all myth into history.[633] This result was attained with the cooperation of an important factor in the History of Civilisation, which also determined the _direction_ which the myth should take in being transformed into history. We must now consider this factor. § 3. Though the Hebrews were intellectually dependent on the older inhabitants of Canaan, and had to take up a receptive position towards them in matters of civilisation and religion, it was nevertheless inevitable that a strong antagonism should grow up between the two sides. The Hebrews edged themselves in like an unbidden guest into the midst of the Canaanitish system of tribes. As they could gain their political position in that system only by conquest and repression, so also they could maintain, protect, and confirm it only by continuous defensive wars. We find Philistines, Moabites, and Edomites the constant deadly foes of the existence of the Hebrew state, and the history of Israel in Canaan is filled up with incessant struggles of greater or less magnitude, in which the Hebrews, themselves scarcely settled in a home, were forced to engage against the repressed old inhabitants on the one hand, and the menaced neighbouring peoples on the other. Moreover, the nomadic characteristic, still preserved by the Hebrews, of faithfully maintaining the memory of their national individuality, could not be entirely obscured by their new spiritual life, which was only borrowed from strangers, especially as the constant wars in which they were necessarily involved against those strangers were calculated to heighten and confirm it. Indeed, the spirit of tribe and race, the repelling and exclusive tendency which characterised the Canaanitish peoples,[634] nourished in the Hebrews the desire to insist on the enforcement and development of individuality on their side too. This exclusiveness, this consciousness of individual peculiarity which lived in the mind of the people, could not now find expression in religion. When even modern Biblical criticism, coming into the inheritance of a