personal causes like himself. He sprang to the conclusion that all hidden causes were also persons. These persons are the dramatis personæ of myth. It was a person who caused thunder, with a hammer or a mace; or it was a bird whose wings produced the din.
"From this rough philosophy which prevailed in the early ages were born the gods and goddesses"—deities made not only in the likeness of man, but of savage man as he, in his ignorance and superstition, conceived himself to be. Fontenelle might have added, that those fancied personal causes who became gods were also fashioned in the likeness of the beasts, whom early man regarded as his equals or superiors. But he neglects this point. He correctly remarks that the gods of myth appear immoral to us because they were devised by men whose morality was all unlike ours—who prized justice less than power, especially (he might have added) magical power. As morality ripened into self-consciousness, the gods improved with the improvement of men; and "the gods known to Cicero are much better than those known to Homer, because better philosophers have had a hand at their making." Moreover, in the earliest speculations an imaginative and hair-brained philosophy explained all that seemed extraordinary in nature; while the sphere of philosophy was filled by fanciful narratives about facts. The constellations called the Bears were accounted for as metamorphosed men and women. Indeed, "all the metamorphoses are the physical philosophy of these early times," which accounted for every fact by what we now call ætiological nature-myths. Even the peculiarities of birds and beasts were thus explained. The partridge flies low because Dædalus (who had seen his son Icarus perish through a lofty flight) was changed into a partridge. This habit of mind, which finds a story for the solution of every problem, survives, Fontenelle remarks, in what we now call folklore—popular tradition. Thus, the elder tree is said to have borne as good berries as the vine does, till Judas Iscariot hanged himself from its branches.
