While all races have passed through this myth-making { 21} stage, certain races have been more gifted, or else more favored by the circumstances of their development. A vivid imagination, a relatively complex society with different traditions, a diversified landscape, an inviting climate, and a leisurely, yet vigorous life were necessary to the highest efflorescence of this poetic power to weave human motives into nature and into the conduct of supernatural powers conceived after the manner of men. These conditions were fulfilled to a remarkable degree among the Greeks, whose mythology constantly surprises us by its richness, variety and delicacy. As the years rolled by, every striking aspect of nature or of traditional ritual was interpreted in terms of the passion, plan or caprice of some being, different from, yet by no means alien to, man. The daring and beauty of the legends woven by this race and the immensity of their range have made them the admiration and wonder of other times more given to reflection than to phantasy. The childhood of the race was productive in a memorable fashion which has made art and literature forever its debtors.
In our admiration for Greek mythology, we must not forget that other races and nations wove stories to account for human life and to interpret those features of nature which aroused their fear, love or wonder. Our own Northern mythology had its beauties and wild reaches of imagination which made it, in certain regards, a fit rival of that of the Mediterranean. The story of Balder, the joyous and kindly god whom all things loved, is evidently the mythical form of the passing of summer sunshine and the coming of winter with its darkness and gloom. We must always remember that our remote ancestors interpreted their world concretely, { 22} and mainly in terms of human life, because they had no abstract ideas at their command. Psychical and physical concepts were interfused in their minds: prose and poetry, fact and figure combined together without that feeling of disharmony which is so distinctive of the modern mind. Nature welcomed personification, and to read the conflict of light and darkness, warmth and cold, in terms of human struggles and hates was the inevitable course for human thought to take. The simple grandeur of many of these tales of the gods comes from the poignancy of life itself. Those events in nature which affected man intensely received an intense meaning. We, who have conquered nature in large measure, or can so predict her convulsions as to escape the first shock of her rude forces; we, who think of her processes as ruled by impersonal laws, cannot appreciate the directness and unveiled immediacy of those ancient dramas which man saw around him. Darkness is for us the absence of light, not a mysterious and threatening presence which fills the sky while the kindly god of day sleeps. Light consists of vibrations in ether emitted from a tremendously hot, material substance instead of being a beneficent force under the control of a radiant being.