and insipid. It may be noted
that the Chinese mythology labours under the same defect." And
then there comes the crushing judgment of an over-zealous Christian
missionary sinologist: "There is no hierarchy of gods brought in to
rule and inhabit the world they made, no conclave on Mount Olympus,
nor judgment of the mortal soul by Osiris, no transfer of human love
and hate, passions and hopes, to the powers above; all here is ascribed
to disembodied agencies or principles, and their works are represented
as moving on in quiet order. There is no religion [!], no imagination;
all is impassible, passionless, uninteresting.... It has not, as in
Greece and Egypt, been explained in sublime poetry, shadowed forth in
gorgeous ritual and magnificent festivals, represented in exquisite
sculptures, nor preserved in faultless, imposing fanes and temples,
filled with ideal creations." Besides being incorrect as to many
of its alleged facts, this view would certainly be shown by further
study to be greatly exaggerated.

Periods Fertile in Myth

What we should expect, then, to find from our philosophical study of
the Chinese mind as affected by its surroundings would be barrenness of
constructive imagination, except when birth was given to myth through
the operation of some external agency. And this we do find. The period
of the overthrow of the Yin dynasty and the establishment of the
great house of Chou in 1122 B.C., or of the Wars of the Three States,
for example, in the third century after Christ, a time of terrible
anarchy, a medieval age of epic heroism, sung in a hundred forms of
prose and verse, which has entered as motive into a dozen dramas,
or the advent of Buddhism, which opened up a new world of thought and
life to the simple, sober, peace-loving agricultural folk of China,
were stimuli not by any means devoid of result. In China there are gods
many and heroes many, and the very fact of the existence of so great
a multitude of gods would logically imply a wealth of mythological
lore inseparable from their apotheosis. You cannot--and the Chinese
cannot--get behind reason. A man is not made a god without some
cause being assigned for so important and far-reaching a step; and
in matters of this sort the stated cause is apt to take the form of
a narrative more or less marvellous or miraculous. These resulting
myths may, of course, be born and grow at a later time than that
in which the circumstances giving rise to them too