weight, numerical proportion, in short the experimental method, took possession of the facts, acts, and processes of the mind, as of every other object and subject of nature.  In addition to the great names of modern psychologists in England, we may mention among other experimental psychologists in Germany, Fechner, Wundt, Lotze, Helmholtz, Weber, Kammler, etc.; illustrious men in France and elsewhere might also be cited to show what progress has been made and is about to be made in this field.  The destruction of myth and of the subjective myths of psychology is always going on, and a positive science of mental phenomena has arisen, like that of natural phenomena.  The ultimate phase of myth is so near its end that it has been possible to create a psychology implying the absence of a soul.  The scientific faculty has now indeed a complete ascendency over the mythical representation with which it was originally coeval.

Yet we do not mean to say that myth is extinct.  In the case of the great majority of the human race, a small and elect portion excepted, myth and all the superstitions which proceed from it persist in an ideal, cosmic, spiritual, or religious form, and these are only slowly disappearing among the common people, and even among the educated classes.  Owing to the primordial and innate necessity which it is so difficult to overcome, science itself still nourishes myths within its pale, although unconsciously and in their most rational form.  Within our own recollection the imponderable was a tenet of physics, and this was indeed, in spite of all the enlightenment of science, a mythical entification of forces.  The same mythical entifications were found in physiology, in chemistry, in nearly all the sciences.  Undoubtedly these scientific myths had no anthropomorphic value, yet they are notwithstanding truly mythical entifications, inasmuch as they virtually personify laws, or mere modes of motion.

Ether, according to our present conception of it, differing in its laws and influences from the atoms which constitute the world, and working among and above them, is perhaps only a grand myth like that of the imponderable, which has been exploded; that is, it is held to be a material entity, while it may be only another modification of the elementary matter in a state differing from the three already known to us; some of Crooke’s late experiments on one condition of extremely gaseous matter leads to this assumption.  The divided forces of matter, and the dualism which still survives, are also mythical conceptions.  Although so much progress has been made in a rational direction, and truth is widely diffused, yet the old mythical instinct constantly reappears in some form or other.  I must be permitted to say that this is an evident proof of the truth of my theory.  Unless myth were due to an intrinsic psychical and organic law, it would not so persistently reappear.  As soon as men are rationally conscious of this entifying faculty and its immediate effects on knowledge, the illusion will cease.  Myth will be destroyed in every kind of facts and phenomena, and science, no longer the unconscious victim of this illusion, will advance with caution and assurance.