This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881 edition. Excerpt: ...and the loveliness of a Nausikaa, could have been preceded by a race of men whose chief amusement consisted in inventing absurd tales about gods and other nondescript beings--a race of men, in fact, on whose tomb the historian could inscribe no better epigram than that on Bitto and Phainis. Although later ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1881 edition. Excerpt: ...and the loveliness of a Nausikaa, could have been preceded by a race of men whose chief amusement consisted in inventing absurd tales about gods and other nondescript beings--a race of men, in fact, on whose tomb the historian could inscribe no better epigram than that on Bitto and Phainis. Although later poets may have given to some of these fables a charm of beauty, and led us to accept them as imaginative compositions, it is impossible to conceal the fact that, taken by themselves, and in their literal meaning, most of these ancient myths.are absurd and irrational, and frequently opposed to the principles of thought, religion, and morality, which guided the Greeks as soon as they appear to us in the twilight of traditional history. By whom, then, were these stories invented?--stories, we must say at once, identical in form and character, whether ive find them on Indian, Persian, Greek, Italian, Slavonic, or Teutonic soil. Was there a period of temporary insanity, through which the human mind had to pass, and was it a madness identically the same in the south of India and in the north of Iceland? It is impossible to believe that a people who, in the very infancy of thought, produced men like Thales, Herakleitos, and Pythagoras, should have consisted of idle talkers but a few centuries before the time of these sages. Even if we take only that part of mythology which refers to religion, in our sense of the word, or the myths, which bear on the highest problems of philosophy--such as the creation, the relation of man to God, life and death, virtue and vice--myths generally the most modern in origin, we find that even this small portion, which might be supposed to contain some sober ideas, or.some pure and sublime conceptions, is unworthy of the...
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