it. We know how essentially eye-minded the Egyptian was, to use a
modern psychological phrase--that is to say, how essential to him
it seemed that all his conceptions should be visualized. The
evidences of this are everywhere: all his gods were made
tangible; he believed in the immortality of the soul, yet he
could not conceive of such immortality except in association with
an immortal body; he must mummify the body of the dead, else, as
he firmly believed, the dissolution of the spirit would take
place along with the dissolution of the body itself. His world
was peopled everywhere with spirits, but they were spirits
associated always with corporeal bodies; his gods found lodgment
in sun and moon and stars; in earth and water; in the bodies of
reptiles and birds and mammals. He worshipped all of these
things: the sun, the moon, water, earth, the spirit of the Nile,
the ibis, the cat, the ram, and apis the bull; but, so far as we
can judge, his imagination did not reach to the idea of an
absolutely incorporeal deity. Similarly his conception of the
mechanism of the heavens must be a tangibly mechanical one. He
must think of the starry firmament as a substantial entity which
could not defy the law of gravitation, and which, therefore, must
have the same manner of support as is required by the roof of a
house or temple. We know that this idea of the materiality of the
firmament found elaborate expression in those later cosmological
guesses which were to dominate the thought of Europe until the
time of Newton. We need not doubt, therefore, that for the
Egyptian this solid vault of the heavens had a very real
existence. If now and then some dreamer conceived the great
bodies of the firmament as floating in a less material
plenum--and such iconoclastic dreamers there are in all ages--no
record of his musings has come down to us, and we must freely