oduction to this chapter and the
one which is to follow, on "Rivers and Waterfalls." "In those
moments of the civilised man's life when he casts off hard dull
science, and returns to childhood's fancy, the world-old book of
nature is open to him anew. Then the well-worn thoughts come
back fresh to him, of the stream's life that is so like his own;
once more he can see the rill leap down the hill-side like a child,
to wander playing among the flowers; or can follow it as, grown
to a river, it rushes through a mountain gorge, henceforth in
sluggish strength to carry heavy burdens across the plain. In all
that the water does, the poet's fancy can discern its personality
of life. It gives fish to the fisher, and crops to the husbandman;
it swells in fury and lays waste the land; it grips the bather with
chill and cramp, and holds with inexorable grasp its drowning
victim. . . . What ethnography has to teach of that great element
of the religion of mankind, the worship of well and lake, brook
and river, is simply this--that what is poetry to us was
philosophy to early man; that to his mind water acted not by
laws of force, but by life and will; that the water-spirits of
primeval mythology are as souls which cause the water's rush
and rest, its kindness and its cruelty; that lastly man finds, in the
beings with such power to work him weal or woe, deities with a
wider influence over his life, deities to be feared and loved, to
be prayed to and praised and propitiated with sacrificial gifts."

Tylor has here given a masterly resume of a large group of
facts, and has viewed them from a particular angle--not quite
that of the nature-mystic, though not so far removed as might
appear. He does not make it appear that there was any organic
connection between the phenomena and the mythology, nor
even between the phenomena and the feelings which the
modern man, in certain moods, feels stirring within him at their
prompting. These myths are simply "fancies"; the "feelings" are
simply those of "the poet." The wider view adopted by so many
philosophers and scientists (as was shown in the chapter on
animism) does not seem to have won his adherence--perchance
was not known to him. And yet in sentence after sentence he
hovers on the brink of genuine Nature Mysticism. His sympathy
with the leaping rill and the rushing river is deep and
spontaneous; he is evidently well pleased to open afresh "the
world-old book of nature," and to read it i