these earliest story-makers were not
idle dreamers, entertaining themselves
by endless manufacture of imaginary
incidents, conditions, and persons.
They were, on the contrary, the ob-
servers, the students, the scientists of
their period; their endeavour was not
to create a fiction, but to explain the
world and themselves. Their obser-
vation was imperfect, and they made
ludicrous mistakes of fact because they
lacked both knowledge and training;
but they made free use of the creative
faculty, and there is, consequently,
a good deal more truth in their dar-
ing guesses than in many of those
provisional explanations of nature and
ourselves which have been based too
exclusively on scrutiny of the obvious
fact, and indifference to the fact, which
is not less a fact because it is elusive.

The myth-makers endeavoured to

[[232]]

p231 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p232w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p233

v?