In our admiration for Greek mythology, we must not forget that other races and nations wove stories to account for human life and to interpret those features of nature which aroused their fear, love or wonder. Our own Northern mythology had its beauties and wild reaches of imagination which made it, in certain regards, a fit rival of that of the Mediterranean. The story of Balder, the joyous and kindly god whom all things loved, is evidently the mythical form of the passing of summer sunshine and the coming of winter with its darkness and gloom. We must always remember that our remote ancestors interpreted their world concretely, {22} and mainly in terms of human life, because they had no abstract ideas at their command. Psychical and physical concepts were interfused in their minds: prose and poetry, fact and figure combined together without that feeling of disharmony which is so distinctive of the modern mind. Nature welcomed personification, and to read the conflict of light and darkness, warmth and cold, in terms of human struggles and hates was the inevitable course for human thought to take. The simple grandeur of many of these tales of the gods comes from the poignancy of life itself. Those events in nature which affected man intensely received an intense meaning. We, who have conquered nature in large measure, or can so predict her convulsions as to escape the first shock of her rude forces; we, who think of her processes as ruled by impersonal laws, cannot appreciate the directness and unveiled immediacy of those ancient dramas which man saw around him. Darkness is for us the absence of light, not a mysterious and threatening presence which fills the sky while the kindly god of day sleeps. Light consists of vibrations in ether emitted from a tremendously hot, material substance instead of being a beneficent force under the control of a radiant being. But other races than the Aryan were less inclined to embellish and humanize nature. The imagination worked less freely to add to the visible aspect of things. The consequence of this thinness of reaction was, that the mind rested in things as they appeared, although it could not desist from assigning to them capacities and powers which were superhuman. Nature was at least instinct with will, even while this vaguely stirring will did not clothe itself in definite forms. Man believed {23} himself surrounded by forces which affected him for good and evil; he felt himself immersed in an ocean of life, yet he could not discern any forms back of that which he saw with his bodily eyes. Perhaps these other races had less of the dramatic in their composition, less of that genial delight in far-fetched analogies and the free play of ideas.