So, for instance, the judgment which a superficial
traveller passes on foreign manners or religions is plausible to him
and to his compatriots just because it represents the feeling that
such manifestations awaken in strangers and does not attempt to convey
the very different feeling really involved for the natives; had the
latter been discovered and expressed the traveller's book would have
found little understanding and no sale in his own country. This
plausibility to the ignorant is present in all spontaneous myth.
Nothing more need be demanded of irresponsible fiction, which makes no
pretensions to be a human document, but is merely a human
entertainment.
Now, a human psychology, even of the finest grain, when it is applied
to the interpretation of the soul of matter, or of the soul of the
whole universe, obviously yields a view of the irresponsible and
subjective sort; for it is not based on any close similarity between
the observed and the observer: man and the ether, man and cosmic
evolution, cannot mimic one another, to discover mutually how they
feel. But just because merely human, such an interpretation may remain
always plausible to man; and it would be an admirable entertainment if
there were no danger that it should be taken seriously.
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