three or four centuries ago, what must it have been in that
dark antiquity when not even the crudest generalizations of
Greek or of Oriental science had been reached? The same
mighty power of imagination which now, restrained and guided
by scientific principles, leads us to discoveries and
inventions, must then have wildly run riot in mythologic
fictions whereby to explain the phenomena of nature. Knowing
nothing whatever of physical forces, of the blind steadiness
with which a given effect invariably follows its cause, the
men of primeval antiquity could interpret the actions of
nature only after the analogy of their own actions. The only
force they knew was the force of which they were directly
conscious,--the force of will. Accordingly, they imagined all
the outward world to be endowed with volition, and to be
directed by it. They personified everything,--sky, clouds,
thunder, sun, moon, ocean, earthquake, whirlwind.[9] The
comparatively enlightened Athenians of the age of Perikles
addressed the sky as a person, and prayed to it to rain upon
their gardens.[10] And for calling the moon a mass of dead
matter, Anaxagoras came near losing his life. To the ancients
the moon was not a lifeless ball of stones and clods: it was
the horned huntress, Artemis, coursing through the upper
ether, or bathing herself in the clear lake; or it was
Aphrodite, protectress of lovers, born of the sea-foam in the
East near Cyprus. The clouds were no bodies of vaporized
water: they were cows with swelling udders, driven to the
milking by Hermes, the summer wind; or great sheep with moist
fleeces, slain by the unerring arrows of Bellerophon, the sun;
or swan-maidens, flitting across the firmament, Valkyries
hovering over the battle-field to receive the souls of falling