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If every time we think of a force we should think of a person, we should
see the world as the men and women who made the myths saw it. Everything
that moved, or made a sound, or flashed out light, or gave out heat was
a person to them; they could not think of the wind rushing through the
trees or the storm devastating the fields without out imagining someone
like themselves, only more powerful, behind the uproar and destruction,
any more than we can see a lantern moving along the road at night
without thinking instinctively that somebody is carrying it.
Our idea of the world is scientific because it is based on exact though
by no means complete knowledge; the myth-makers' idea of the world was
poetic because, with very incomplete knowledge, they could not imagine
how anything could be done unless it was done as they did things. When
the black clouds gather on a summer afternoon and roll up the sky in
great, terrifying masses, and the lightning flashes from them and the
crash of the thunder fills the air and the rain beats down the crops, we
feel as if we were in the laboratory of nature seeing a wonderful
experiment made; when our ancestors saw the same spectacle they were
sure that a great dragon, breathing fire and roaring with anger, was
ravaging the earth. As children to-day imagine that dolls are alive,
that fairies dance in moonlit meadows on summer nights, or beasts or
Indians make the sounds in the woods, so the people who made the myths
filled the world with creatures unlike themselves, but with something of
human intelligence, feeling and will.
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