l the superstitions which proceed from it persist in an ideal, cosmic,
spiritual, or religious form, and these are only slowly disappearing
among the common people, and even among the educated classes. Owing to
the primordial and innate necessity which it is so difficult to
overcome, science itself still nourishes myths within its pale, although
unconsciously and in their most rational form. Within our own
recollection _the imponderable_ was a tenet of physics, and this was
indeed, in spite of all the enlightenment of science, a mythical
entification of forces. The same mythical entifications were found in
physiology, in chemistry, in nearly all the sciences. Undoubtedly these
scientific myths had no anthropomorphic value, yet they are
notwithstanding truly mythical entifications, inasmuch as they virtually
personify laws, or mere modes of motion.

Ether, according to our present conception of it, differing in its laws
and influences from the atoms which constitute the world, and working
among and above them, is perhaps only a grand myth like that of the
imponderable, which has been exploded; that is, it is held to be a
material entity, while it may be only another modification of the
elementary matter in a state differing from the three already known to
us; some of Crooke's late experiments on one condition of extremely
gaseous matter leads to this assumption. The divided forces of matter,
and the dualism which still survives, are also mythical conceptions.
Although so much progress has been made in a rational direction, and
truth is widely diffused, yet the old mythical instinct constantly
reappears in some form or other. I must be permitted to say that this is
an evident proof of the truth of my theory. Unless myth were due to an
intrinsic psychical and organic law, it would not so persistently
reappear. As soon as men are rationally conscious of this entifying
faculty and its immediate effects on knowledge, the illusion will cease.
Myth will be destroyed in every kind of facts and phenomena, and
science, no longer the unconscious victim of this illusion, will advance
with caution and assurance.

CHAPTER VIII.

OF DREAMS, ILLUSIONS, NORMAL AND ABNORMAL HALLUCINATIONS, DELIRIUM, AND
MADNESS--CONCLUSION.

In the preceding chapters, I have shown, as I believe, the genesis of
myth, the fundamental faculty in which it necessarily originates, and
its evolution in man, particularly in the Aryan and Semitic races