1. First, they were much less removed than we are from the influence of
fetishistic and animistic traditions. Even in the Greek and Roman
classics the casual reader is often revolted by the grossly absurd
stories told of gods and heroes. And, indeed, it is impossible to
conceive of the amours of Zeus (or Jove), for instance, with Leda,
Europa or Danaë as having been first conceived during an age marked by
the poetic genius and comparative culture evinced in the most ancient
epics. But the most probable solution of the puzzle is that the earliest
civilization inherited a number of animal stories, such as are
characteristic of savagery in all parts of the world, and that the first
literary generations into whose poetic myths those stories were
transferred, being as much accustomed to them as to other surroundings
of their childhood, such as bloody sacrifices, mystic expiations, and
fantastic initiations, saw no incongruity in anything told them of the
gods. Besides, as those wild myths were associated with sacred rites,
the inveterate conservatism of religion, which insisted on stone knives
in sacrifices long after bronze and iron came in, was likely enough to
maintain the divine importance of those fables, just as the historicity
of Balaam's ass and Jonah's whale is in some churches piously upheld
still.

[Sidenote: 2. Ancient Ignorance of Natural Order.]

2. In the times from which the first known Pantheistic teaching dates,
ideas of nature's order were incongruous and indeed incommensurable with
ours. Not that the world was then regarded as a chaos. But such order as
existed was considered to be a kind of "balance of power" between
various unseen beings, some good, some evil, some indifferent. True,
some Indian prophets projected an idea of One Eternal Being including
all such veiled Principalities and Powers. But their Pantheism was