shapes to a tree or a bird or a star. But in the civilised races
the genius of the people tends to suppress, exclude and refine away
the wild element, which, however, is never wholly eliminated. The
Erinyes soon stop the mouth of the horse of Achilles when he
begins, like the horse in Grimm's Goose Girl, to hold a sustained
conversation.[1] But the ancient, cruel, and grotesque savage
element, nearly overcome by Homer and greatly reduced by the Vedic
poets, breaks out again in Hesiod, in temple legends and Brahmanic
glosses, and finally proves so strong that it can only be subdued
by Christianity, or rather by that break between the educated
classes and the traditional past of religion which has resulted
from Christianity. Even so, myth lingers in the folk-lore of the
non-progressive classes of Europe, and, as in Roumania, invades
religion.


[1] Iliad, xix. 418.


We have now to demonstrate the existence in the savage intellect of
the various ideas and habits which we have described, and out of
which mythology springs. First, we have to show that "a nebulous
and confused state of mind, to which all things, animate or
inanimate, human, animal, vegetable or inorganic, seem on the same
level of life, passion and reason," does really exist.[1] The
existence of this condition of the intellect will be demonstrated
first on the evidence of the statements of civilised observers,
next on the evidence of the savage institutions in which it is
embodied.