Appalled at his own insignificance amid the sublime mysteries and awful immensities of nature, the shadows of his own mind become to him real existences.

As it is affirmed that the human skin, sensitive to the effects of light, takes the photograph of the tree riven by lightning, so, on the pagan mind lie in ineffaceable and exaggerated grotesqueness the scars of impressions left by hereditary teaching, by natural phenomena and by the memory of events and of landmarks.

Out of the soil of diseased imagination has sprung up a growth as terrible as the drunkard's phantasies.

The earthquake, flood, tidal wave, famine, withering or devastating wind and poisonous gases, the geological monsters and ravening bird, beast and fish, have their representatives or supposed incarnations in mythical phantasms.
Frightful as these shadows of the mind appear, they are both very real and, in a sense, very necessary to the ignorant man.

He must have some theory by which to explain the phenomena of nature and soothe his own terrors.