Now all this has a bearing upon the main subject of our present study.  Meteorology and astronomy are indeed noble sciences, but the proper study of mankind is man.  While, no doubt, the sources of all early folk-lore are composite, yet it matters greatly for the student of these things whether the beginnings of religious thought were merely in the clouds, or whether they had their roots in the same earth whereon we live and labour.  The heroes and great people of the early days are eternal figures, because each new generation gives them a resurrection in its own life and experience.  They have eternal human meanings, beneath whatever pageantry of sun and stars the ancient heroes passed from birth to death.  Soon everything of them is forgotten except the ideas about human life for which they stand.  Then each of them becomes the expression of a thought common to humanity, and therefore secure of its immortality to the end of time; for the undying interest is the human interest, and all ideas which concern the life of man are immortal while man’s race lasts.  In the case of such legends as those we are discussing, it is probable that beyond the mere story some such ideal of human life was suggested from the very first.  Certainly, as time went on, the ideal became so identified with the hero, that to thoughtful men he came to stand for a particular idealism of human experience.  Thus Pater speaks of Dionysus as from first to last a type of second birth, opening up the hope of a possible analogy between the resurrections of nature and something else, reserved for human souls.  “The beautiful, weeping creatures, vexed by the wind, suffering, torn to pieces, and rejuvenescent again at last, like a tender shoot of living green out of the hardness and stony darkness of the earth, becomes an emblem or ideal of chastening and purification, and of final victory through suffering.”  This theory would also explain the fact that one nation’s myths are not only similar to, but to a large extent practically identical with, those of other nations.  There is a common stock of ideas supplied by the common elements of human nature in all lands and times; and these, when finely expressed, produce a common fund of ideals which will appeal to the majority of the human race.

Thus mythology was originally simple storytelling.  But men, even in the telling of the story, began to find meanings for it beyond the mere narration of events; and thus there arose in connection with all stories that were early told, a certain number of judgments of what was high and admirable in human nature.  These were not grounded upon philosophical or scientific bases, but upon the bed-rock of man’s experience.  Out of these judgments there grew the great ideals which from first to last have commanded the spirit of man.