the student, that the
marvellous portion of these old stories is no illegitimate extres-cence,
but was rather the pith and centre of the whole, [8] in days when there
was no supernatural, because it had not yet been discovered that there
was such a thing as nature. The religious myths of antiquity and the
fireside legends of ancient and modern times have their common root in
the mental habits of primeval humanity. They are the earliest recorded
utterances of men concerning the visible phenomena of the world into
which they were born.

That prosaic and coldly rational temper with which modern men are wont
to regard natural phenomena was in early times unknown. We have come
to regard all events as taking place regularly, in strict conformity to
law: whatever our official theories may be, we instinctively take this
view of things. But our primitive ancestors knew nothing about laws of
nature, nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of
cause and effect, nothing about the necessary regularity of things.
There was a time in the history of mankind when these things had never
been inquired into, and when no generalizations about them had been
framed, tested, or established. There was no conception of an order of
nature, and therefore no distinct conception of a supernatural order of
things. There was no belief in miracles as infractions of natural laws,
but there was a belief in the occurrence of wonderful events too mighty
to have been brought about by ordinary means. There was an unlimited
capacity for believing and fancying, because fancy and belief had not
yet been checked and headed off in various directions by established
rules of experience. Physical science is a very late acquisition of the
human mind, but we are already sufficiently imbued with it to be almost
completely disabled from comprehending the thoughts of our ancestors.
"How Finn cosmogonists could have believed the earth and heaven to be
made out of a severed egg, the upper concave shell representing
heaven, the yolk being earth, and the crystal surrounding fluid the
circumambient ocean, is to us incomprehensible; and yet it remains a
fact that they did so regard them. How the Scandinavians could have
supposed the mountains to be the mouldering bones of a mighty Jotun,
and the earth to be his festering flesh, we cannot conceive; yet such a
theory was solemnly taught and accepted. How the ancient Indians could
regard the rain-clouds as cows