I mean permanently, for momentarily they may and must have
done so. But before man's consciousness had wholly disentangled itself
from outward objects, all nature was but a many-sided mirror which gave
back to him a thousand images more or less beautified or distorted,
magnified or diminished, of himself, till his imagination grew to look
upon its own incorporations as having an independent being. Thus, by
degrees, it became at last passive to its own creations. You may see
imaginative children every day anthropomorphizing in this way, and the
dupes of that super-abundant vitality in themselves, which bestows
qualities proper to itself on everything about them. There is a period of
development in which grown men are childlike. In such a period the fables
which endow beasts with human attributes first grew up; and we luckily
read them so early as never to become suspicious of any absurdity in
them. The Finnic epos of "Kalewala" is a curious illustration of the same
fact. In that every thing has the affections, passions, and consciousness
of men. When the mother of Lemminkaeinen is seeking her lost son,--
"Sought she many days the lost one,
Sought him ever without finding;
Then the roadways come to meet her,
And she asks them with beseeching:
'Roadways, ye whom God hath shapen,
Have ye not my son beholden,
Nowhere seen the golden apple,
Him, my darling staff of silver?'
Prudently they gave her answer,
Thus to her replied the roadways:
'For thy son we cannot plague us,
We have sorrows too, a many,
Since our own lot is a hard one
And our fortune is but evil,
By dog's feet to be run over,
By the wheel-tire to be wounded,
And by heavy heels down-trampled.
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