ecting itself thereby in all the inexhaustible variety
of her appearances. However changeable nature may be, the imagination is
equally so."[59] It animates everything--not only fire in general,
_Agni_, but also the seven forms of flame, the wood that lights it, the
ten fingers of the sacrificing priest, the prayer itself, and even the
railing surrounding the altar. This is one example among many others.
The partisans of the linguistic theory have been able to maintain that
at this moment every word is a myth, because every word is a name
designating a quality or an act, transformed by the imagination into
substance. Max Mueller has translated a page of Hesiod, substituting the
analytic, abstract, rational language of our time for the image-making
names. Immediately, all the mythical material vanishes. Thus, "Selene
kisses the sleeping Endymion" becomes the dry formula, "It is night."
The most skilled linguists often declare themselves unable to change the
pliant tongue of the imaginative age into our algebraic idioms.[60]
Thought by imagery cannot remain itself and at the same time take on a
rational dress.

The mental state that marks the zenith of the free development of the
imagination, is at present met with only in mystics and in some poets.
Language has, however, preserved numerous vestiges of it in current
expressions, the mythic signification of which has been lost--the sun
rises, the sea is treacherous, the wind is mad, the earth is thirsty,
etc.

To this triumphant period there succeeds among the races that have made
progress in evolution, i.e., that have been able to rise above the age
of (pure) imagination, the period of waning, of regression, of decline.
In order to understand it and perceive the how and why of it, let us
first note that myths are reducible to two great categories:

a. The explicative myths, arising from utility, from the necessity of
knowing. _These undergo a radical transformation._

b. The non-explicative myths, resulting from a need of luxury, from a
pure desire to create: these undergo only a _partial_ transformation.

Let us follow them in the accomplishment of their destinies.

a. The myths of the first class, answering the various needs of knowing
in order afterwards to act, are much the more numerous.... Is primitive
man by nature curious? The question has been variously answered; thus,
Tylor says yes; Spencer, no.[61] The affirmative and negative answers
are not, perhaps, i