f soul or body, and the man who masters it by
completeness of knowledge. It is interesting and pathetic to find how
universally these two figures held the attention and stirred the
hearts of primitive men; how infinitely varied are their tasks, their
perils, and their vicissitudes. They wear so many guises, they bear so
many names, they travel so far and compass so much experience that it
is impossible, in any interpretation of mythology, to escape the
conviction that they were the dominant types in the thought of the
myth-makers. And these earliest story-makers were not idle dreamers,
entertaining themselves by endless manufacture of imaginary incidents,
conditions, and persons. They were, on the contrary, the observers,
the students, the scientists of their period; their endeavour was not
to create a fiction, but to explain the world and themselves. Their
observation was imperfect, and they made ludicrous mistakes of fact
because they lacked both knowledge and training; but they made free
use of the creative faculty, and there is, consequently, a good deal
more truth in their daring guesses than in many of those provisional
explanations of nature and ourselves which have been based too
exclusively on scrutiny of the obvious fact, and indifference to the
fact, which is not less a fact because it is elusive.

The myth-makers endeavoured to explain the world, but that was only
one-half of their endeavour; they attempted also to explain
themselves. They discovered the striking analogies between certain
natural phenomena or processes and the phenomena and processes of
their own nature; they discovered the tasks and wanderings of the sun,
and they perceived the singular resemblance of these tasks and
wanderings to the happenings of their own lives. So the hero and the
wanderer became subjective as well as objective, and symbolised what
was deepest and most universal in human nature and human experience,
as well as what was most striking in the external world. When
primitive men looked into their hearts and their experience, they
found their deepest hopes, longings, and possibilities bound up and
worked out in two careers,--the career of the hero and the career of
the wanderer.

These two figures became the commanding types of all the nobler
mythologies, because they symbolised what was best, deepest, and most
real in human nature and life. They represent the possible reach and
the occasional achievement of the human soul;