The word ‘myth’ has fallen on evil days so far at least as common speech goes. We say that something is a mere myth, an old wives’ tale, or else that it is primitive, interesting enough for the anthropologist, but from the sophisticated point of view only a fable. The word carries with it the suggestion that something untrue is being asserted in a specious and attractive way. A lie is clothed with all the charm of a story for children.

So far as this sense goes we are all, rightly, children of the Enlightenment. The myth story is no substitute for science. The myth is not, in any of its forms, verifiable in the same manner as is the scientific proposition, but it does not follow that mythological statements are untrue or unimportant. To assert this a priori is simply to restrict one's notion of verification to an admittedly useful technique, which quite clearly fails to test the whole content of experience.