474 THE WORK OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE
ness, is not and never will be deeply moved by abstract phil-
osophers or recondite economists. We all of us base our
opinions on every conceivable subject, not upon the results of
hard, slow, and painful thought and study, but upon the whis-
pered rumor, the contagious suspicion, or the vehement, pic-
turesque, and reiterated accusations of the fiction-writer. More-
over, being still only some hundred generations removed from
barbarism and savagery, we all still have deep in our methods
of thought that instinctive habit of personifying everything,
which the scientists call “anthropomorphism.” For primitive
and ancient man always personified as human beings those
abstract forces in life and nature which he could not otherwise
comprehend, and modern man in hundreds of ways still follows
in his footsteps.
The ancient Greek, for example, without our scientific
knowledge, was naturally puzzled in trying to determine why
the sun rose and set, why there were storms over sea and land,
or why the seasons recurred in endless succession. As we
know, he finally concluded that in each instance some semi-
human, semi-divine person was responsible for it all. The sun
consequently came to be thought of as a charioteer who drove
flaming horses across the sky, and the winds as winged beings
who flew through the air. Thus, a whole pantheon of pagan
gods finally resulted from the primitive man’s inability to think
in abstract, scientific terms about the universe.
So, too, the American Indian who could not understand the
destructive and terrifying force of the lightning, finally decided
that there must be a personal devil behind it, who, for all his
evidently superior powers, was after all only another Indian
like himself with a more cruel and disagreeable disposition.
This natural theory proved so satisfactory that thereafter he
had not the slightest doubt that he really understood practically
everything worth while knowing about lightning.
Modern Myths and Myth-Makers.—This plunge into
ancient myths and myth-making is not such a digression from
