CHAPTER VIII.
MYTHOLOGY.
Mythic Fancy based, like other thought, on Experience — Mythology affords evidence for studying laws of Imagination — Change in public opinion as to credibility of Myths — Myths rationalized into Allegory and History — Ethnological import and treatment of Myth — Myth to be studied in actual existence and growth among modern savages and barbarians — Original sources of Myth — Early doctrine of general animation of Nature — Personification of Sun, Moon, and Stars; Water-spout, Sand pillar, Rainbow, Waterfall, Pestilence — Analogy worked into Myth and Metaphor — Myths of Rain, Thunder, &c. — Effect of Language in formation of Myth — Material Personification primary, Verbal Personification secondary — Grammatical Gender, male and female, animate and inanimate, in relation to Myth — Proper Names of objects in relation to Myth — Mental State proper to promote mythic imagination — Doctrine of Werewolves — Phantasy and Fancy.
Among those opinions which are produced by a little knowledge, to be dispelled by a little more, is the belief in an almost boundless creative power of the human imagination. The superficial student, mazed in a crowd of seemingly wild and lawless fancies, which he thinks to have no reason in nature nor pattern in this material world, at first concludes them to be new births from the imagination of the poet, the tale-teller, and the seer. But little by little, in what seemed the most spontaneous fiction, a more comprehensive study of the sources of poetry and romance begins to disclose a cause for each fancy, an education that has led up to each train of thought, a store of inherited materials from out of which each province of the poet's land has been shaped, and built over, and peopled. Backward from our own times, the course of mental history may be traced
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