The philosophy of mythology, differing from all these, finding beyond question similarities which history cannot unriddle, interprets them by no incomprehensible assumption, but by the identity of the laws of thought acting on similar impressions under the guidance of known categories of thought. Nor does it stop here, but proceeds to appraise these results by the general scheme of truth and error. It asks for what psychological purpose man has so universally imagined for himself gods--pure creations of his fancy;--whether that purpose can now or will ultimately be better attained by an exercise of his intellect more in accordance with the laws of right reasoning; and thus seeking to define the genuine food of the religious desire, estimates the quality and value of each mythological system by the nearness of its approach to this standard. The philosophy of mythology, starting with the wish or prayer as the unit of religious thought, regards all myths as theories about the unknown power which is supposed to grant or withhold the accomplishment of the wish. These theories are all based upon the postulate of the religious sentiment, that there is order in things; but they differ from scientific theories in recognizing volition as an efficient cause of order. The very earliest efforts at religious thought do not rise to the formation of myths, that is, connected narratives about supernatural beings. All unknown power is embraced under a word which does not convey the notion of personality; single exhibitions of power which threaten man’s life are supposed to be the doings of an unseen person, often of a deceased man, whose memory survives; but any general theory of a hierarchy, or of the world or man, is not yet visible. Even such immature notions are, however, so far as they go, framed within the category of causality; only, the will of the god takes the place of all other force. This stage of religious thought has been called Animism, a name which does not express its peculiarity, which is, that all force is not only supposed to proceed from mind, but through what metaphysicians call “immanent volition,” that is, through will independent of relation. Mind as “emanant volition,” in unison with matter and law, the “seat of law,” to use an expression of Professor Boole’s, may prove the highest conception of force. As the slowly growing reason reached more general notions, the law which prescribes unity as a condition of thought led man early in his history to look upon nature as one, and to seek for some one law of its changes; the experience of social order impressed him with the belief that the unseen agencies around him also bore relations to each other, and acknowledged subjection to a leader; and the pangs of sickness, hunger and terror to which he was daily exposed, and more than all the “last and greatest of all terribles, death,” which he so often witnessed, turned his early meditations toward his own origin and destiny.