they excite into activity in the search the imaginative
faculty,--always of earlier development than the judgment in both
peoples and individuals, and which never fails, when so employed, to
conduct to delusions and extravagances. And this state of mind gives
birth simultaneously to both false religion and false science. Great
tempests, inundations, eclipses, earthquakes, thunder and lightning,
famine and pestilence, the births of monsters, or the rare visitation of
strange fishes or wild animals, come all to be included in the
mythologic domain. Even the untutored Indian "sees God in clouds, and
hears him in the wind." And when an order of priesthood springs up, a
portion of the leisure of the class is usually employed in speculating
on these phenomena; and to their speculations they give the form of
direct revelation. Thus almost all the false religions of the old
world--not grafted, like Mohammedanism, on the true one--have their
pretended revelations regarding the form, structure, and origin of the
earth, the mechanism of the heavens, the electric and meteoric
phenomena, and even the arrangement of oceans and continents on the
surface of our planet.

The old extinct forms of heathenism,--Etrurian, Egyptian, Phoenician,
and Babylonian,--had all their cosmogonies.[32] In the wild mythology of
ancient Scandinavia, of which we find such distinct traces in the
languages and superstitions of northern Europe, and which even in our
own country continues to give the names of its uncouth deities to the
days of our week, there is a strange genesis of not only the heavens and
earth, but of the gods also. It has, besides, its scheme of the universe
in its great mundane tree of three vast roots,--celestial, terrestrial,
and infernal,--which supports the land, the sea, the sky, and all
things. The leading religions of the East which still survive, such as
Buddhism, Brahminism, and Parseeism, have all their astronomy,
geography, meteorology, and geology, existing as component parts of
their several systems. Nor have there been wanting ingenious men who,
though little tolerant of the various attempts made to reconcile the
Mosaic account of creation with the discoveries of modern science, have
looked with a favorable eye on the wild science of the false religions,
and professed to detect in it at least striking analogies with the
deductions of both the geologist and the astronomer. When the skeptical
wits of the last century wished