These flights of fancy, which may have lasted thousands of centuries, became crystallised at last in the mythologies of all peoples, and it is these mythologies by which we gain access to this initial stage in the life of humanity, and which preserves for us the traces of this eternal truth amidst many extravagances of the fancy misled by language, which guided their first steps. There is a petrified philosophy in mythology. Since history and legend, in one form or another, have voiced the feelings called religion, these feelings, variously interpreted, have changed their aspect from age to age, and from country to country; as long as we have not traced the stream to its source, the question, as to the manner in which the conception of God had birth in the human mind, will always be before us. We take man at the time when he had recently appeared on the earth, his sole possession being his five senses, which place him in contact with the external world. We must distinguish between two classes of senses; those of touch, scent, and taste being more evident; from the evolutionist’s point of view the sense of touch has the largest share in the building up of the human edifice which arose later; its use is chiefly connected with the hands, and has thus given us the word _manifest_; that which we call certainty hardly exists for us apart from what is manifest. The two other senses, sight and hearing, are less sure, and have frequently to be verified by those first named. The objects of which we obtain knowledge by means of our senses can be divided into tangible, semi-tangible and intangible. The first are, for instance, a stone, a bone, a fruit, the skin of an animal, these can be touched as it were all round, and we are able to assert their reality. The second, the semi-tangible, might be a river, a mountain, the earth, a tree. We stand by the banks of a river and dip our hand in the small volume of water passing away before our eyes; we can also touch the ground on which we are standing, also the trunk of the tree beneath which we are sitting; but it is only an insignificant part of which we assert the reality by touching it, all the other parts remain unknown to us; for the river itself consists of a large mass of waters springing from a source which is not seen and flowing towards a spot which we may never see; we are told that the earth is in the shape of a globe, and that this globe is suspended in air, which fact it would be difficult to verify; the tree is small in comparison with the river and the earth, and yet how little we know of it, whence come its buds, and its leaves, and the sap which rises each spring in the branches? We say of a beam that it is dead wood, but of the tree we say that it grows and lives; what is this life of the tree? We are in the presence of the unknown. These are samples of semi-tangible objects. The sense of touch has no place with regard to the sky, the stars, the clouds,