bird, is to the simple, uncultivated man no objection to this view. It
is long, indeed, before education brings men to the point where they
can criticise their first explanations of Nature.

As men in their advance come to see how much nobler are their own
natures than those of the lower animals, they gradually put aside the
explanation of events by the actions of beasts, and account for the
order of the world by the supposition that each and every important
detail is controlled by some immortal creature essentially like a man,
though much more powerful than those of their own kind. This stage of
understanding is perhaps best shown by the mythology of the Greeks,
where there was a great god over all, very powerful but not
omnipotent; and beneath him, in endless successions of command,
subordinate powers, each with a less range of duties and capacities
than those of higher estate, until at the bottom of the system there
were minor deities and demigods charged with the management of the
trees, the flowers, and the springs--creatures differing little from
man, except that they were immortal, and generally invisible, though
they, like all the other deities, might at their will display
themselves to the human beings over whom they watched, and whose path
in life they guided.

Among only one people do we find that the process of advance led
beyond this early and simple method of accounting for the processes of
Nature, bringing men to an understanding such as we now possess. This
great task was accomplished by the Greeks alone. About twenty-five
hundred years ago the philosophers of Greece began to perceive that
the early notion as to the guidance of the world by creatures
essentially like men could not be accepted, and must be replaced by
some other view which would more effectively account for the facts.