t admired of classic poets that these escaped
prisoners became afterwards the great gods of Greece, gods believed in by
Homer, worshipped by Sokrates, immortalized by Pheidias? Why should we
listen to such horrors as that Tantalos killed his own son, boiled him,
and placed him before the gods to eat? or that the gods collected his
limbs, threw them into a cauldron, and thus restored Pelops to life,
_minus_, however, his shoulder, which Demeter had eaten in a fit of
absence, and which had therefore to be replaced by a shoulder made of
ivory?

Can we imagine anything more silly, more savage, more senseless, anything
more unworthy to engage our thoughts, even for a single moment? We may
pity our children that, in order to know how to construe and understand
the master-works of Homer and Virgil, they have to fill their memory with
such idle tales; but we might justly suppose that men who have serious
work to do in this world would banish such subjects forever from their
thoughts.

And yet, how strange, from the very childhood of philosophy, from the
first faintly-whispered Why? to our own time of matured thought and
fearless inquiry, mythology has been the ever-recurrent subject of anxious
wonder and careful study. The ancient philosophers, who could pass by the
petrified shells on mountain-tops and the fossil trees buried in their
quarries without ever asking the question how they came to be there, or
what they signified, were ever ready with doubts and surmises when they
came to listen to ancient stories of their gods and heroes. And, more
curious still, even modern philosophers cannot resist the attraction of
these ancient problems. That stream of philosophic thought which,
springing from Descartes (1596-1650), rolled on through the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries in two beds--the _idealistic_, marked by the names
of Malebranche (1638-1715), Spinoza (1632-1677), and Leibniz (1646-1716);
and the _sensualistic_, marked by the names of Locke (1632-1704), David
Hume (1711-1776), and Condillac (1715-1780), till the two arms united
again in Kant (1724-1804), and the full stream was carried on by Schelling
(1775-1854), and Hegel (1770-1831),--this stream of modern philosophic
thought has ended where ancient philosophy began--in a Philosophy of
Mythology, which, as you know, forms the most important part of
Schelling's final system, of what he called himself his _Positive
Philosophy_, given to the world after the death of