Uw grows, as shown in Part L, are ^splayed by aU fonns of the ■mkTclopcd mind — by the mind of the saYnge, by the mind of tbe chiliBed chfld, by the mind of the cirilixed i^alt in its aocoltnred slate. Dread of ghosts fa common to them alL The horror the chiU ht^ whett alone in the dark, and the fear of a rostic passing' charehyaid by n^t, show as the stiU-continaed feeling which te have fooMl to be tiie easential element of primitire religions. If, thea. this sentiment excited by supposed inrisible beings, which prompts the savage to worship, fa a sentiment oonspicaoos in tbe yonog aad ^norant amo^ oorselTes; we may infer that if the sarage has ao allied sentiment prompting worship, this, also, while manifest in bim, most be aimiarly manifest in oar own yonng and ignorant So. too. with the thoaght^ement which mythologists ssaibe to the savage. The specnlative tendency whidi they suppose caoses piimitife inteipretatioQS (^ Xature, fa a tendency whidi he sbooM habitnaay dfapky, and which the least devdoped of the eifilized should also cisakj. Observe the facts under both these heads.
9. The familiar Sun excites m the child no awe whatever. B^ caDii^ hfa boyhood, no one can recall any feeling of fear dravo out by this most strikii^ object in Nature, or any sign of sodi feeling m hfa companions. Again, what peasant or what servant-giH he- trays the slightest reverence for the Son? Gazed at oocasiooaOyi admired peihaps when settu!^, it fa regarded without even a tinge of the sentiment called worship. Sach allied sentiment as Brii^ (and it fa but an allied sontimait) arises only in the minds of the cultured, to whom sdenoe has revealed the vastness of the Unirer^* Similarly with other familiar things. A laboorer has not erai respect for the Earth he digs; still less any sach emotion as oign^ kiad him to treat it as a deity. It fa trae that the child mjj^ awed by a thunderstorm and that the ignorant may ^^^^^ superstitious terror at a comet; but these are not usual and ordffi/ hA^ u occnrrences. Daily experiences prove that sarronndiDg objects and powers, however great, excite no religions emotion in undeveloped minds, if tbej are common and not supposed to be dangei^ous.
And this, which analogy suggests as the state of the savage mind, is the state which travellers describe. The lowest types of men are devoid of wonder. As shown in § 45, they do not marvel even at remarkable things they never saw before, so long as there is nothing alarming abont them. And if their surprise is not aroused by these unfamiliar things, still less is it aroused by the things wit- nessed dally from birth. What is more marvellous than flame? — coming no one sees whence, moving, making sounds, intangible and yet hurting the hands, devouring things and then vanishing. Yet the lowest races are not characterized by fire-worship.
Direct and indirect evidence thus unite to show us that in the primitive man, there does not exist that sentiment which Nature- worship presupposes. And long before mental evolution initiates it, the Earth and the Heavens have been peopled by the super- natural beings, derived from ghosts, which really draw out his hopes and fears, and prompt his offerings and prayers.
10. Similarly with the implied thought-element. The ignorant among ourselves are unspeculative They show scarcely any rational curiosity respecting even the most imposing natural phenomena. TV hat rustic asks a question as to the constitution of the Sun? When does he think abont the cause of the Moon's changes 7 What sign does he give of a wish to know how clouds are formed? Where is the evidence that his mind ever entertained a thought concern- ing the origin of the winds? Not only is there an absence of any tendency to inquire, but there is utter indifference when explanation is offered. He accepts these common-place things as matters of course, which it does not concern him to account for.
It is thus, also, with the savage. Even in the absence of proof it would be inferable that if the great mass of minds in our own race are thus unspeculative, the minds of inferior races must be still more unspeculative. But, as was shown in § 46, we have direct proof. Absence of rational curiosity is habitually remarked by travellers among the lowest races. That which Dr. Rink says of the Esquimaux, that '^ existence in general is accepted as a fact, without any speculation as to its primitive origin," is said by others in kindred ways of various rude peoples. Nay, savages even ridicule as foolish, questions abont the ordinary course of Nature; no matter how conspicuous the changes displayed.
Thus the intellectual factor, too, implied by the alleged mytho- poeic tendency, is wanting in early stages; and advancing intelligence does not begin to manifest it until long after the ghost-theory has originated a mechanism of causation.
11. Joined with these two erroneoos assamptions is the aasump- tioD, also erroneous, that the primitive man is given to '^ imaginatiye fictions." Here is another mistalce caused by ascribing to undeveloped natares, the traits which developed natures exhibit. As shown in 9 47, the savage is characterized bj lack of imagination; and fiction^ implying imagination, arises onlj as civilization progresses. The man of low type no more invents stories than he invents tools or processes; but in the one case, as in the other, the products of his activity evolve bv small modifications* Among inferior races tbe only germ of tnat which eventually becomes literature, is the narrative of events. The savage tells the occurrences of to-day's chase, the feats of the fight that happened yesterday, the suc- cesses of his father who lately died, the triumphs of his tribe in a past generation. Without the slightest idea of making marvellous stories, he makes them unawares. Having only rude speech full of metaphor; being prompted by vanity and unchecked by regard for truth; immeasurably credulous himself and listened to by his descendants with absolute faith; his narratives rapidly become monstrously exaggerated, and eventually diverge so widely from possibility, that to us they seem mere freaks of fancy.
On studying facts instead of trusting to hypotheses we see this to be the origin of primitive legends. Looked at apart from pre- conceptions, the evidence (see Descriptive Sociology^ '^^Esthetic Products ") shows that there is originaUy no mythopoeic tendency^ but that the so-called myth begins with a story of human adven* ture. Hence this assumed factor also is wanting.
12. One more 8iq>poRition is made for which there is, in like manner, no warrant The argnment of the mythologists proceeds on the assumption that early peoples were inevitably betrayed into personalizing abstract nouns. Having got certain symbols for abstractions (either by evolution or else, it would seem, from roots supematurally given); and having, by implication, got a corre- sponding power of abstract thinking; it is alleged that the barbarian thereupon began to deprive his verbal symbols of their abstractness. This remarkable process is one of which clear proof might have been expected; but none is forthcoming. We have, indeed, in his Chipsy etc (voL ii., p. 55), the assertion of Prof. Max Miiller that ** as long as people thought in language, it was simply impossible to speak of morning or evening, of spring and winter, without giving to these conceptions something of an individual, active, sexual, and at last personal character"; (i.e., having, somehow, originally got them without concrete meanings, it was impossible to avoid making their meanings concrete); but to establish the alleged impossibility something more than this authoritative statement is desirable. And considering that the validity of the entire theory depends on the w w trnth of this proposition, one might hare looked for an elaborate demonstration of it. Surely the speech of the nncirilized should furnish abundant materials.
Instead, I find put in eridence certain personalizations of ab* Btracts made by ourselves. Prof. Max Miiller quotes passages in which Wordsworth speaks of Religion as a ^* mother," of ^^ father Time,*' of " Frost's inexorable tooth," of " Winter like a traveller old,** of <^ laughing hours." But in the first place it is to be remarked that these, where not directly traceable to the personages of classic mythology, have obviously arisen by conscious or un- conscious imitation of classic modes of expression, to which our poets have been habituated from boyhood. And then, in the second place, we find no trace of a tendency for this fanciful personaliza- tion to generate beliefs in actual personalities; and unless such a tendency is proved, nothing is proved.
13. Sanskrit is, indeed, said to yield evidence of this personaliza- tion. But the evidence, instead of being direct, is remotely inferen- tial; and the inferences are drawn from materials arbitrarily selected.
How little confidence can be placed in the mode of dealing with the language of the Yedas, may be inferred from the mode of dealing with the Yedic statements. Appeal is professedly made to the ideas of highest antiquity, as being, according to theory, freest from mytho- poeic corruptions. But only such of these ideas as suit the hypo- thesis are taken; and ideas of as high, and indeed of higher, antiquity, which conflict with it are ignored. Of numerous cases, here is one. Soma-worship being common to the Rig-Yeda and the Zend-Avesta, is thereby proved to have existed before the di£fu8ion of the Aryans. Further, as before shown (§ 178), the Rig-Yeda itself calls Soma " the creator and father of the gods," ^ the gene- rator of hymns, of Dyaus, of Prithivl, of Agni, of Snrya, of Indra, and of Yishnu.'' According to this highest authority, then, these so-called Nature-gods were not the earliest. They were preceded by Soma, " king of gods and men," who " confers immortality on gods and men ": the alleged sun-god, Indra, being named as per- forming his great deeds under the inspiration of Soma. Hence if antiquity of idea, as prbved both by the direct statements of the Rig-Yeda itself, and by community of idea with the Zend-Avesta, is to be taken as the test; it is clear that Nature-worship was not primordial among the Aryans.
If we look more closely at the data taken from this ^ book with seven seals " (which is Prof. Max Mailer's name for the book from which, strangely enough, he draws such positive conclusions) and observe how they are dealt with, we do not find ourselves re- assured. The word dyaua, which is a cardinal word in the mytho- logical theory, is said to be derived from the root dyu^ to beam. In Ui 9BMf on ^< Comptfatire Mythology,* Prof. Max Mailer says of it — ^A root of this rich and expansire meaning wonld be applicable to many conceptioos: the dawn, the son, the sky, the day, the starai the eyes, the ocean, and the meadow.'* May we not add that a root of sach varions meanings, vagae in proportioa to their moltiplicity, lends itself to interpretations that are propor- tionately uDcertain T The like holds throaghont One of the per- sonalised Vedic gods, inferred to hare been originally a Natore-god, is the Earth. We are told that there are twenty- one Vedic names for the Earth. We also learn that these names were applicable to rarioos other things; and that consequently << earth, ri?er, sky, dawn, cow, and speech, woald become homonyms.** Oq which statements onr comment may be, that as homonymous words are, by their definition, eqaiTocal or amblgnons^ tranalations of them in particular cases must be correspondingly questionable. No doubt roots that are so " rich," allow ample play to imagination, and greatly facilitate the reaching desired results. But by as much as they afford scope for possible inferences, by so mnch do they dimi- nish the probability of any one inference.* Nor is this alL The interpretation thus made by arbitrary manipulation of Hl-nnderstood materials, is made in pursuance of what seems a self-contradicting doctrine. On the one hand, primitive Aryans are described as having had a speech formed from roots, in such manner that the abstract idea of prvUcting preceded the concrete idea of Af€Uher. On the other hand, of ancient Aryans coming after these primitive Aryans, we are told that they ^* could only speak and think * in personal figures: of necessity they spoke, not of sunset, but of the '^ sun growing old " — ^not of sunrise, but of ''Night giving birth to a brilliant child " — not of Spring, but of *< the San or the Sky embracing the earth.** So that the race who made their concretes out of abstracts, are described as led into these Nature- * How donbtfbl maffc be these interpretations may be jndg«d from the foUowing ijnonynif and homonyms for the Sun, token from the Samttrit Dictionary ol' Mr. Monier Williams. Sura — a god, divinity, deity* a symbo- lical expression for] the number 33; a sage, learned man; the snn., 8Ara — the son; the Soma; a wise or learned man, teacher; a hero^ king. Stira — a hero^ warrior, champion, Taliant man, great or mighty man; a lion, a boar; the ■nn, N. pr. of oerbain plants and trees. SavUri — a generator; sun; epithet of Indra and Siva; a particular plant. Arka — a ray, flash of lightning, sun fire, crystal, copper, N. of Indra and of a plant; memhrum virile^ hymn, singer, learned man, elder brother, food. Ar^aman — a bosom friend, play- fellow, N. pr., snn, Asclepias plant Vivamoai — ^N. pr. of the Sun, Amna, and others. SirdJuura — K. pr., a crow, the sunflower, sun. And there are several others. Though these are from a general Sanskrit Dictionary, and not from a Dictionary of Vedic Sanskrit* yet it must be admitted that the Vedic Sanskrit is as Tagne or yaguer, unless it be affirmed that languages beoome less specific as they de^ielop.
myths by their inability to express abstracts except in terms of concretes!
May we not say, then, that the doctrine of the personalization of abstracts, nnsnpported by evidence which existing races furnish, is not made probable by inferences thus drawn from ancient e?idence 1 14. We need not, howerer, leave off simply with the conclnsion that the hypothesis is nnsastained. Happily we are famished with a definite test, which^ I think, completely disproves it.
As part of the reason why abstract nonns and collective nonns became personalized, Prof. Max Muller says: — <' Now, in ancient langnages every one of these words had necessarily a termi* nation expressive of gender, and this natarally produced in the mind the corresponding idea of sex.*' Here the implication is that the use of a name carrying with it the idea of sex in the thing named, therefore carried with it the idea of something living; since living things alone possess the differences expressed by gender. Observe, now, the converse proposition necessarily going with this. It is implied that in the absence of a termination indicating a mas* culine or feminine natnre in an abstract noun, any liability there may be to give more concreteness to its meaning, will not be joined with a liability to ascribe sex to it. There will be no tendency to personalize it accompanying the tendency to make it concrete; but it will become a nenter concrete. ' TJnqaestionably if a termi- nation implying sex, and therefore implying life, therefore implies personality; where there is no termination implying sex, no impli- cation that there is life and personality will arise. It follows, then, that peoples whose words have no genders will not personalize the powers of nature. Bat the facts directly contradict this inference. " There are no terminations denoting gender in Quichua," the language of the ancient Peruvians; and yet the ancient Peruvians had personalized natural objects and powers — Mountains, Sun, Moon, the Earth, the Sea, etc.; and the like absence of genders and presence of Nature-worship, occurred among the Chibchas, and among the Central Americans. Thns we have undeniable proof that personalization of the great inanimate objects and agents, has no such linguistic cause as that alleged.
15. The many reasons for rejecting the interpretations which mythologists offer us, thus fall into several groups.
Some of them are a priori. The method adopted is doubly wrong — wrong as seeking in the characters of words, explanations which should be sought in the mental phenomena symbolized by those words; and wromr as seeking in developed thoughts and feelings the keys to undeveloped ones, instead of the converse. The assumption, associated with this method, that the human mind had originally a conception of deity such as we now call pure, is directly cootradicied by the erideoee wliidi the wmdwSaed praseoi; ad suicidally implies that there were ahstnct thongiits before there vis ereii an approach to words abstract enough to ooBwej them.
A second group of d priori reasons is otherwse dewiwed. Tbe mythological theory tacitly assumes that some dear diTiaoii eaa be made between legend and history; instead of ree^^nin^ the trwak that in the narratires of events there is a slowly incrensiBg ratio of tmth to error. Ignoring the necessary Implication thai before definite history, numerous partially-tme stories most be cnrrent* it recogniases no eztensire group of distorted traditionB of aeCml erents. And then, instead of seeing in the commoo ^^m^^-*^ of so-called myths, that they describe combats of beings nsn^ wea- pons, evidence that they arose out of human transactions; mytho- logists assnme that the order of Xatore presents itself to the ondeTeloped mind in terms of rictories and defeatsL Of a posteriori reasons for rejecting the theory, come, first, those embodied in denials of its premisses. It is not tme, as tacitly alleged, that the primitive man looks at the powers of Nature with awe. It is not tme that he speculates about their characters and causes. It is not tme that he has a tendency to make fictions^ Every one of these alleged factors of the mythop<Bic process, though present in the developed mind, is absent from the undeveloped mind, whesee the theory assumes it ITet farther reasoos are forthcoming. From premisses unwar- ranted by evidence, the conclusions are reached by processes which are illegitimate. It is implied that men, having originally bad cer- tain s^ns of abstract conceptions, and therefore power of forming such conceptions, were obliged, afterwards, to speak and think in more concrete terms — ^a reversal of direction not to be admitted without strong evidence. The formation of ideal persons out of abstract nouns, which is ascribed to this necessity, ought to be deariy demonstrated from the speech of existing low races, wMch it is not. Instead, we have deductions from an ancient San^it work, unintelligible to the extent of having seven seals, from whicli conclusions called nnqaestionable are drawn by taking some state- ments and ignoring others, and by giving to words which have a score meanings tbose most congrnons with the desired conclusion.
Finally comes the fact which, ev«i were the aigument in general as valid as it is fallacions, would be fatal to it — ^tbe fact that personalization of natural powers, said to be suggested by verbal terminations expressive of sex, occurs just as much iriiere there are no such terminations.
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