a relief to fancy that the incest of Jocasta was originally no more than a figurative way of speaking about the alternations of day and night. He derives, indeed, the same sort of contentment by this method as the rationalist who explains the legend of Pasiphaë upon Euhemeristic principles. Yet it is surely a poor way of whitewashing the imagination of the ancients to have recourse to a theory which sees in myths nothing better than a mange or distemper breaking out in language, and tormenting the human mind for a season. Nor can the theory be stretched so far as to exonerate the nation from its share of interest in these stories. The people who made the supposed linguistic mistakes delighted in the grotesque and fantastic legends which were produced. Even if words deluded them, their wills were free and their brains at work while under the pernicious influence. The real way of exculpating the conscience of the Greeks, indicated both by philosophy and common-sense, is to point out that in the age of reflection the tragic poets moralized these very myths, and made them the subject-matter of the gravest art, while the sages instituted a polemic against the confusion of fabulous mythology with the pure notion of Godhead obtained by reflection. The theory of development which seems to underlie the linguistic doctrine is, that thought in its earliest stage is positive and clear and adequate. The first savage who thinks sees the sun, for example, and calls it the sun; but in talking about the sun he begins to use figurative language, and so converts his simple propositions into myths. At this point, argues the philologer, he goes wrong and becomes the victim of delusions. The fallacy in this view appears to lie in attributing to the simple and sensuous apprehension of the savage the same sort of simplicity as that which we have gained by a process of abstraction, and consequently inferring that the importation of fancy into the thinking process implies a species of degeneracy. The truth seems rather to be quite the contrary. If we grant, for the sake of argument, that the first thoughts are in a certain sense simple, they have nothing in common with the generalizations of the understanding. Except in relation to immediate perceptions, their generality is empty until it has been filled up with the varied matter of the senses and the imagination. Mythology and poetry are, therefore, an advance upon the primitive prose of simple apprehension. What was a mere round ball becomes a dædal world; and it is not till the full cycle of the myth-creating fancy has been exhausted that the understanding can return upon a higher level by abstraction to intellectual simplicity. The same is true about theology. The first dim sense of the divine in nature as a unity may possibly have been prior to the many deities of polytheism; men may have looked upon the open sky and called that god. Yet it was not a retrogression, but an advance from that