psychological; at first reality was wholly objective, and the ideas were only a sublime intellectual myth, but now the objective world disappeared, and the intellect which formulated the conception was the only real thing.  In virtue of the faculty of entification, only the mind and its ideas were real, the world and all which it contained had a doubtful existence.  This tendency had its ultimate expression in Fichte, who created the universe by means of the Ego, thus transforming the earlier objective myth into one which was wonderfully subjective.  Descartes doubted about everything beyond the range of his own thought, and was the first to overthrow the former ideal realism, and to lead the way to science, and to more rational analysis.  To him the teaching of Spinoza and Kant was really due, as well as the English schools which had so much to do with the destruction of the earlier mythical edifice of ideas.

But, as I have already observed, if this great rational progress were important on the one side, on the other it produced a more spiritualized form of myth, namely the subjective, which became still more powerful in the philosophy of Kant.  While some thinkers sought to resolve and dissolve the objective myth, they did it in such a way as to add strength to the subjective form of myth and science, for which Descartes had prepared the way; the theory of Spinoza and of the German school in general fundamentally consists in the substitution of entified forms and dialectics of the mind for the earlier objective forms of ideas.  A great error was rectified, and the former phase of the intellectual evolution of myth disappeared, in favour of another which, although still erroneous, was more rational and independent.

The subjective and still mythical representations, either of the mind or of external objects, were afterwards reduced to true science by positive and experimental methods, aided by instruments, and confirmed by the discoveries of Galileo and of his disciples throughout the civilized world.  He was in modern times another great factor of the dissolution of myth, so far as it is definitive.  Nature was made subordinate to weight and measure, and to their mathematical and mechanical proportions in various phenomena; these were deduced from experiment and the use of instruments, the factors which in the hands of Galileo and his great successors in all civilized nations, destroyed and are still destroying the old mythical conception of the world.  In astronomy they overthrew the catholic tenet of the geocentric constitution of the heavens; they shattered the spheres in which they were confined, opened infinite space, and peopled it with an infinite number of stars, and in the attraction of gravity they discovered the universal law of motion in the firmament.  Thus all the mythical representations of the system of the world, whether Aristotelian, Ptolemaic, or Biblical, vanished for ever, and the great zoomorphic body of the universe was dissolved; to be replaced by worlds circulating in infinite space, subject to the laws of number and of geometry.