al phenomena. The world becomes a drama to
which man holds the key in his own life. He feels himself surrounded
by mysterious forces and agencies, far surpassing his own puny
strength, and inevitably conceives them in analogy with his own
activities. They differ not so much in how they work as in what they
do. In this way, the gods were born into the world--and once born man
has been unable to free himself from them. As he has grown in mental
and moral stature, he has unconsciously reflected into them this
increased knowledge and these higher ideals. And the process, once
begun, has continued to the present. _Not until he has outgrown old
fears and relinquished unwarranted hopes will these beliefs lose their
power. Then and not till then, will reason be able to supplant
mythology by knowledge._

{30}

CHAPTER III

STORIES OF CREATION

In stories of creation we have the imagination of primitive man at
work, trying to answer questions which it was no more prepared to
answer than a child of seven is in a position to understand higher
mathematics. The savage has an answer for every question because he
has no idea of the difficulty of the problems involved. A name or a
story will completely satisfy him because he is uncritical. Now the
stories of creation, or cosmogonies, as they are technically called,
are peculiarly interesting because they give us an insight into the
concrete terms which the imagination was forced to use in its attempt
to picture the past and the origin of things. Moreover, we can trace
the changes these naive stories underwent as man's experience broadened
and he was able to think more abstractly. We can become acquainted
with the materials with which the poet-priest of the pre-scientific
past worked to build himself a marvelous and soul-satisfying tale; and
we are able, as history unrolls, to watch myth gradually pass into
theology.

The desire to explain how nature came to be and how man arose was
well-nigh universal. Everywhere we find accounts of a distant past
when the gods walked on earth. Egyptians, Hindoos, Greeks, Japanese,
Polynesians, Hebrews and American Indians had tales of the origin of
things to tell. This desire to account for {31} origins is not hard to
understand. The same psychological tendency is at work to-day and
gives zest to the theory of evolution. Why did the _Descent of Man_
awaken such a storm throughout the Western World if not because it
shook