framed gods like unto themselves in action and in experience, and
that the allegorical softening down of myths is the explanation
added later by descendants who had attained to purer ideas of
divinity, yet dared not reject the religion of their ancestors."[2]
The senseless element in the myths would, by this theory, be for the
most part a "survival"; and the age and condition of human thought
whence it survived would be one in which our most ordinary ideas
about the nature of things and the limits of possibility did not yet
exist, when all things were conceived of in quite other fashion; the
age, that is, of savagery.


[1] We have been asked to DEFINE a savage. He cannot be defined in
an epigram, but by way of choice of a type:--

1. In material equipment the perfect savage is he who employs
tools of stone and wood, not of metal; who is nomadic rather than
settled; who is acquainted (if at all) only with the rudest forms
of the arts of potting, weaving, fire-making, etc.; and who derives
more of his food from the chase and from wild roots and plants than
from any kind of agriculture or from the flesh of domesticated
animals.

2. In psychology the savage is he who (extending unconsciously to
the universe his own implicit consciousness of personality) regards
all natural objects as animated and intelligent beings, and,
drawing no hard and fast line between himself and the things in the
world, is readily persuaded that men may be metamorphosed into
plants, beasts and stars; that winds and clouds, sun and dawn, are
persons with human passions and parts; and that the lower animals