ship of
the abstract divine, the moral law believed in as an ultimate object.
"Science" in many minds is genuinely taking the place of a religion.
Where this is so, the scientist treats the "Laws of Nature" as
objective facts to be revered. A brilliant school of interpretation of
Greek mythology would have it that in their origin the Greek gods were
only half-metaphoric personifications of those great spheres of
abstract law and order into which the natural world falls apart--the
sky-sphere, the ocean-sphere, the earth-sphere, and the like; just as
even now we may speak of the smile of the morning, the kiss of the
breeze, or the bite of the cold, without really meaning that these
phenomena of nature actually wear a human face.[23]

[22] Symposium, Jowett, 1871, i. 527.

[23] Example: "Nature is always so interesting, under whatever aspect
she shows herself, that when it rains, I seem to see a beautiful woman
weeping. She appears the more beautiful, the more afflicted she is."
B. de St. Pierre.

As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at present seek an
opinion. But the whole array of our instances leads to a conclusion
something like this: It is as if there were in the human consciousness
a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of
what we may call "something there," more deep and more general than any
of the special and particular "senses" by which the current psychology
supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. If this were
so, we might suppose the senses to waken our attitudes and conduct as
they so habitually do, by first exciting this sense of reality; but
anything else, any idea, for example, that might similarly excite it,
would have that same prerogative of appearing real which objects of
sense normally possess. So far as religious conceptions were able to
touch this reality-feeling, they would be believed in in spite of
criticism, even though they might be so vague and remote as to be
almost unimaginable, even though they might be such non-entities in
point of WHATNESS, as Kant makes the objects of his moral theology to
be.

The most curious proofs of the existence of such an undifferentiated
sense of reality as this are found in experiences of hallucination. It
often happens that an hallucination is imperfectly developed: the
person affected will feel a "presence" in the room, definitely
localized, facing in one particular way, real in the m