All we know is that its mention is coeval with chronicle, and its origin lost in allegory.

The Bible, one of the oldest written records in the world, begins with a bit of mythology of a very significant kind.

When the Jews undertook to trace back their family tree to an idyllic garden of Eden, they mentioned as growing there beside the tree of life, another tree called the tree of knowledge.

Of what character this knowledge was is inferable from the sudden self-consciousness that followed the partaking of it.

So that if we please we may attribute directly to Eve's indiscretion the many evils of our morbid self-consciousness of the present day.