enough to be disregarded in ordinary use, or by poets, was sure to be developed in proportion as men felt the need of making precise distinctions.
Logos grew to mean the inward constitution as well as the outward form of thought, and consequently became the expression of exact thought,—which is exact because it corresponds to universal and unchanging principles,—and reached its highest exaltation in becoming not only the reason in man, but the reason in the universe,—the Divine Logos, the thought of God, the Son of God, God himself. Thus we have in the Gospel of Saint John, "In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
Mythos meant, in the widest sense, everything uttered by the mouth of man,—a word, an account of something, a story as understood by the narrator.
In Attic Greek mythos signified a prehistoric story of the Greeks; with Aristotle it was the plot of a tragedy, which is the Attic meaning with a narrower application; for the tragedies were all taken from the prehistoric stories of Greece, and the prehistoric stories of Greece were narratives of divinities and heroes, that is, forces and principles of Nature; though this was not known to the Greeks of that time.
