obtained in this manner, the subsequent, though sometimes mistaken
classification of their specific types enables the mind to arrange his
knowledge of natural things in a more synthetic and orderly way, and by
such classification man is always tending towards a more universal
unity: he places the general forms of phenomena in an ideal harmony,
which fancifully symbolizes their laws.

In the succeeding chapters we shall see how this process is
accomplished, and how it leads up to the explicit exercise of the
reason. A more definite empiric knowledge, and the harmonious
classification of specific types with a view to unity, are a proof of a
relatively greater improvement, both in civilization and morality. This
is abundantly shown in all those peoples who have attained to an
altogether anthropomorphic polytheism, either among the Aryans, prior to
their dispersion, in the Vedic period in India, among the Celts,
Græco-Latins, Germans, Slavs, or in the Finnish races, Mongols, Chinese,
Assyrians, Egyptians, Mexicans, and Peruvians, as well as among the
barbarous peoples of modern times.

The imagination, the faculty which creates and excites phantasms in man,
is not, as is erroneously supposed, the primary source of myths, but
only that which in a secondary degree elaborates and perfects their
spontaneous forms; and precisely because it is near akin to this
primordial mythical faculty, it goes on to organize and classify these
polytheistic myths. By a moral and necessary development an
approximation is made, if not to truth itself, at any rate to its
symbols; whence reason is afterwards more easily infused into myth on
the one side, and on the other it is resolved into rational ideas and
cosmic laws. It was in this way that poets perfected myth in its
influence on virtue and civilization, and by them it was directed into