ontained.
The vague and changing effects of the atmosphere, the masses of
mountains, the infinite and living complexity of forests, did not
fascinate them. They had not that preponderant taste for the
indeterminate that makes the landscape a favourite subject of
contemplation. But love of nature, and comprehension of her, they
had in a most eminent degree; in fact, they actually made explicit
that objectification of our own soul in her, which for the romantic
poet remains a mere vague and shifting suggestion. What are the
celestial gods, the nymphs, the fauns, the dryads, but the definite
apperceptions of that haunting spirit which we think we see in the
sky, the mountains, and the woods? We may think that our vague
intuition grasps the truth of what their childish imagination turned
into a fable. But our belief, if it is one, is just as fabulous, just as
much a projection of human nature into material things; and if we
renounce all positive conception of quasi-mental principles in
nature, and reduce our moralizing of her to a poetic expression of
our own sensations, then can we say that our verbal and illusive
images are comparable as representations of the life of nature to
the precision, variety, humour, and beauty of the Greek mythology?

_Extensions to objects usually not regarded authentically._

Sec. 34. It may not be superfluous to mention here certain analogous
fields where the human mind gives a series of unstable forms to
objects in themselves indeterminate.[9] History, philosophy,
natural as well as moral, and religion are evidently such fields. All
theory is a subjective form given to an indeterminate material. The
material is experience; and although each part of experience is, of
course, perfectly definite in itself, and just that experience which it
is, yet the recollection and relating together of the successive
experiences is a function of the theoretical faculty. The systematic
relations of things in time and space, and their dependence upon
one another, are the work of our imagination. Theory can therefore
never have the kind of truth which belongs to experience; as
Hobbes has it, no discourse whatsoever can end in absolute
knowledge of fact.

It is conceivable that two different theories should be equally true
in respect to the same facts. All that is required is that they should
be equally complete schemes for the relation and prediction of the
realities they deal with. The choice between them