filled with ideal creations." Besides being incorrect as to many
of its alleged facts, this view would certainly be shown by further
study to be greatly exaggerated.


Periods Fertile in Myth

What we should expect, then, to find from our philosophical study of
the Chinese mind as affected by its surroundings would be barrenness of
constructive imagination, except when birth was given to myth through
the operation of some external agency. And this we do find. The period
of the overthrow of the Yin dynasty and the establishment of the
great house of Chou in 1122 B.C., or of the Wars of the Three States,
for example, in the third century after Christ, a time of terrible
anarchy, a medieval age of epic heroism, sung in a hundred forms of
prose and verse, which has entered as motive into a dozen dramas,
or the advent of Buddhism, which opened up a new world of thought and
life to the simple, sober, peace-loving agricultural folk of China,
were stimuli not by any means devoid of result. In China there are gods
many and heroes many, and the very fact of the existence of so great
a multitude of gods would logically imply a wealth of mythological
lore inseparable from their apotheosis. You cannot--and the Chinese
cannot--get behind reason. A man is not made a god without some
cause being assigned for so important and far-reaching a step; and
in matters of this sort the stated cause is apt to take the form of
a narrative more or less marvellous or miraculous. These resulting
myths may, of course, be born and grow at a later time than that
in which the circumstances giving rise to them took place, but,
if so, that merely proves the persistent power of the originating
stimulus. That in China these narratives always or often reach the