unmeaning; which are not merely inapplicable, but were always intrinsically useless.  We recognise them wherever a man talks of “the survival of the fittest,” meaning only the survival of the survivors; or wherever a man says that the rich “have a stake in the country,” as if the poor could not suffer from misgovernment or military defeat; or where a man talks about “going on towards Progress,” which only means going on towards going on; or when a man talks about “government by the wise few,” as if they could be picked out by their pantaloons.  “The wise few” must mean either the few whom the foolish think wise or the very foolish who think themselves wise.

There is one piece of nonsense that modern people still find themselves saying, even after they are more or less awake, by which I am particularly irritated.  It arose in the popularised science of the nineteenth century, especially in connection with the study of myths and religions.  The fragment of gibberish to which I refer generally takes the form of saying “This god or hero really represents the sun.”  Or “Apollo killing the Python means that the summer drives out the winter.”  Or “The King dying in a western battle is a symbol of the sun setting in the west.”  Now I should really have thought that even the skeptical professors, whose skulls are as shallow as frying-pans, might have reflected that human beings never think or feel like this.  Consider what is involved in this supposition.  It presumes that primitive man went out for a walk and saw with great interest a big burning spot on the sky.  He then said to primitive woman, “My dear, we had better keep this quiet.  We mustn’t let it get about.  The children and the slaves are so very sharp.  They might discover the sun any day, unless we are very careful.  So we won’t call it ‘the sun,’ but I will draw a picture of a man killing a snake; and whenever I do that you will know what I mean.  The sun doesn’t look at all like a man killing a snake; so nobody can possibly know.  It will be a little secret between us; and while the slaves and the children fancy I am quite excited with a grand tale of a writhing dragon and a wrestling demigod, I shall really mean this delicious little discovery, that there is a round yellow disc up in the air.”  One does not need to know much mythology to know that this is a myth.  It is commonly called the Solar Myth.

Quite plainly, of course, the case was just the other way.  The god was never a symbol or hieroglyph representing the sun.  The sun was a hieroglyph representing the god.  Primitive man (with whom my friend Dombey is no doubt well acquainted) went out with his head full of gods and heroes, because that is the chief use of having a head.  Then he saw the sun in some glorious crisis of the dominance of noon on the distress of nightfall, and he said, “That is how the face of the god would shine when he had slain the dragon,” or “That is how the whole world would bleed to westward, if the god were slain at last.”