APPENDIX B: THE MYTHOLOGICAL THEORY.

An inquiry carried on in a way properly called scientific may, according to the nature of the case, proceed either inductively or deductively. Without making any assumptions, the inquirer may, and in some cases must, begin by collecting together numerous cases; and then, after testing by the method of difference the result yielded by the method of agreement, or subjecting it to others of the tests needful to exclude error, he may, if it withstands all such tests, accept the induction as true. Or, otherwise, if there exists a pre-established induction, or an a priori truth (which is an induction organically registered), he may set out from this, and deduce his conclusion from it.

In his Introduction to the Science of Religion, Professor Max Müller does not adopt either of these methods. As given on page 143 (new edition of 1882), his theory is that, in the case of other races as in the case of the Turanian race there dealt with, men’s religious ideas arise thus:—“First, a worship of heaven, as the emblem of the most exalted conception which the untutored mind of man can entertain,” expanding to . . . “a belief in that which is infinite. Secondly, a belief in deathless spirits or powers of nature. . . . Lastly, a belief in the existence of ancestral spirits.” To give anything like a scientific character to this theory, he ought to do at least one of two things. Either he should cite a number of cases in which among men whose state is the rudest known, there exists this heaven-worship and resulting conception of the infinite, or else he should prove that his theory is a necessary deduction from admitted laws of the human mind. He does not fulfil either Edition: current; Page: [831] of these requirements, or even attempt to fulfil either. Not simply does he fail to give such numerous cases of Nature-worship existing without any other kind of worship, as would serve for the basis of an induction, but I am not aware that he has given a single case: the reason being, I believe, that no cases are to be found; for my own inquiries, which are tolerably extensive, have not brought one to my knowledge. On the other hand, so far from being able to deduce his conclusion from laws of mind, he is obliged deliberately to ignore laws of mind which are well established. If, as he alleges, men began with worshipping heaven as symbolizing the infinite, afterwards worshipping the powers of Nature as personalized, and finally ancestral spirits, then the progress of thought is from the abstract to the concrete: the course implied is the reverse of that known to be followed.

While it cannot, I think, be admitted that what is called by Professor Max Müller the Science of Religion has any claim whatever to the name science, we find evidence that his conclusion was from the outset a foregone conclusion, and one certainly not belonging to the class distinguished as scientific. Here are two extracts which throw light on the matter:—

The other extract is from the closing paragraph of the preface written by Professor Max Müller to the Myths and Songs from the South Pacific. Speaking of that work, he says—

Noting how the theological here hides the scientific, I may add that anyone who reads Mr. Gill’s volume and contemplates the many verifications it contains of the inference otherwise so amply supported, that ancestor-worship is the root of all religions, will be surprised to see how readily a foregone conclusion can find for itself support in a mass of evidence which to other readers will seem fatal to it.

But now leaving this general criticism, let us examine deliberately and in detail the hypothesis of Professor Max Müller, and that mythological theory associated with it.

1. A more special science cannot be fully understood until the more general science including it is understood; and it is a corollary Edition: current; Page: [832] that conclusions drawn from the more special cannot be depended on in the absence of conclusions drawn from the more general. Philological proofs are therefore untrustworthy unless supported by psychological proofs. Not to study the phenomena of mind by immediate observation, but to study them immediately through the phenomena of language, is necessarily to introduce additional sources of error. In the interpretation of evolving thoughts, there are liabilities to mistake. In the interpretation of evolving words and verbal forms, there are other liabilities to mistake. And to contemplate the mental development through the linguistic development, is to encounter a double set of risks. Though evidence derived from the growth of words is useful as collateral evidence, it is of little use by itself; and cannot compare in validity with evidence derived from the growth of ideas. Hence the method of the mythologists, who argue from the phenomena which the symbols present, instead of arguing from the phenomena symbolized, is a misleading method.

One illustration will suffice. In a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, on March 31st, 1871, Prof. Max Müller said—“The Zulus call the soul the shadow, and such is the influence of language that, even against the evidence of the senses, the Zulus believe that a dead body can cast no shadow, because the shadow—or, as we should say, the ghost—has departed from it.” (Times, 1 Ap., 1871.) Here the explanation is regarded as entirely linguistic. The course of thought which, among so many races, has led to identification of soul and shadow, and which has for its corollary the departure of the soul or shadow at death, is ignored. Those who have digested the abundant evidence given in the text, will see how profound is the misconception caused.

2. In another way—allied though different—does the method of the mythologists reverse the right method. They set out with the ideas and feelings possessed by the civilized. Carrying these with them they study the ideas and feelings of the semi-civilized. And thence they descend by inference to the ideas and feelings of the uncivilized. Beginning with the complex they get from it the factors of the simple. How great are the errors to be anticipated, an analogy will show. So long as biologists gathered their cardinal conceptions from much-developed organisms their interpretations were quite wrong; and they were set right only when they began to study little-developed organisms—the lower types and the embryos of the higher types. That the teeth, though rooted in the jaws, do not belong to the skeleton, but are dermal structures, is a truth which no anatomist, dealing with adult mammals only, would ever have Edition: current; Page: [833] imagined; and this truth is but one out of many disclosed by examining animals in the order of ascending evolution. Similarly with social phenomena, including the systems of belief men have formed. The order of ascending evolution must be followed here too. The key to these systems of belief can be found only in the ideas of the lowest races.

3. The distortion caused by tracing the genesis of beliefs from above downwards, instead of tracing it from below upwards, is exemplified in the postulate of Prof. Max Müller that there was at first a high conception of deity which mythology corrupted. He says (Sci. of Lan., ii, 467) that “the more we go back, the more we examine the earliest germs of every religion, the purer, I believe, we shall find the conceptions of the Deity.” Now, unless we assume that Prof. Max Müller is unacquainted with such facts as are brought together in Part I, we shall here recognize a perversion of thought caused by looking at them in the wrong order. We shall be the more obliged to recognize this, on remembering that his linguistic researches furnish him with abundant proofs that men in low stages have no terms capable of expressing the idea of a Universal Power; and can, therefore, according to his own doctrine, have no such idea. Lacking words even for low generalities and abstractions, it is utterly impossible that the savage should have words in which to frame a conception uniting high generality with high abstractness. Holding so unwarranted a postulate, it is very improbable that Prof. Max Müller’s mythological interpretations, harmonized as we must suppose with this postulate, can be true.

4. The law of rhythm in its social applications, implies that alternations of opinion will be violent in proportion as opinions are extreme. Politics, Religion, Morals, all furnish examples. After an unqualified acceptance of the Christian creed, those who inquired passed to unqualified rejection of it as an invention of priests: both courses being wrong. Similarly, after belief in classic legends as entirely true, there comes repudiation of them as entirely false: now prized as historic fact, they are now thrown aside as nothing but fiction. Both of these judgments are likely to prove erroneous. Being sure that the momentum of reaction will carry opinion too far, we may conclude that these legends are neither wholly true nor wholly untrue.

5. The assumption that any decided division can be made between legend and history is untenable. To suppose that at a certain stage we pass suddenly from the mythical to the historical is absurd. Progress, growing arts, increasing knowledge, more Edition: current; Page: [834] settled life, imply a gradual transition from traditions containing little fact and much fancy, to traditions containing little fancy and much fact. There can be no break. Hence any theory which deals with traditions as though, before the time when they are classed as historic, they are entirely unhistoric, is inevitably wrong. It must be assumed that the earlier the story the smaller the historic nucleus; but that some historic nucleus habitually exists. Mythologists ignore this implication.

6. If we look at the ignoring of this implication under another aspect, we shall be still more startled by it. A growing society coming at length to recorded events, must have passed through a long series of unrecorded events. The more striking of such will be transmitted orally. That is to say, every early nation which has a written history, had, before that, an unwritten history; the most remarkable parts of which survived in traditions more or less distorted. If, now, the alleged doings of heroes, demi-gods, and deities, which precede definite history, are recognized as these distorted traditions, the requirement is satisfied. If, otherwise, these are rejected as myths, then there comes the question—Where are the distorted traditions of actual events? Any hypothesis which does not furnish a satisfactory answer to this question is out of court.

7. The nature of pre-historic legends suggests a further objection. In the lives of savages and barbarians the chief occurrences are wars. Hence the traits common to mythologies—Indian, Greek, Babylonian, Tibetan, Mexican, Polynesian, etc.—that the early deeds narrated, even including the events of creation, take the form of fightings, harmonizes with the hypothesis that they are expanded and idealized stories of human transactions. But this trait is not congruous with the hypothesis that they are fictions devised to explain the genesis and order of Nature. Though the mythologist imagines the phenomena to be thus naturally formulated; there is no evidence that they tend thus to formulate themselves in the undeveloped mind. To see this, it needs but to ask whether an untaught child looking at the surrounding world and its changes, would think of them as the products of battles.

8. The study of superstitions by descending analysis instead of by ascending synthesis, misleads in another way. It suggests causes of Nature-worship which do not exist. The undeveloped mind has neither the emotional tendencies nor the intellectual tendencies which mythologists assume.

Note, first, that the feelings out of which worship really grows, as shown in Part I, are displayed by all forms of the Edition: current; Page: [835] undeveloped mind—by the mind of the savage, by the mind of the civilized child, by the mind of the civilized adult in its uncultured state. Dread of ghosts is common to them all. The horror a child feels when alone in the dark, and the fear with which a rustic passes through a churchyard by night, show us the still-continued sentiment which we have found to be the essential element of primitive religions. If, then, this sentiment excited by supposed invisible beings, which prompts the savage to worship, is a sentiment conspicuous in the young and in the ignorant among ourselves; we may infer that if the savage has an allied sentiment directed towards powers of nature and prompting worship, this, also, while manifest in him, must be similarly manifest in our own young and ignorant.

So, too, with the thought-element which mythologists ascribe to the savage. The speculative tendency which they suppose causes primitive interpretations of Nature, is a tendency which he should habitually display, and which the least developed of the civilized should also display. Observe the facts under both these heads.

9. The familiar Sun excites in the child no awe whatever. Recalling his boyhood, no one can recall any feeling of fear drawn out by this most striking object in Nature, or any sign of such feeling in his companions. Again, what peasant or what servant-girl betrays the slightest reverence for the Sun? Gazed at occasionally, admired perhaps when setting, it is regarded without even a tinge of the sentiment called worship. Such allied sentiment as arises (and it is but an allied sentiment) arises only in the minds of the cultured, to whom science has revealed the vastness of the Universe or in whom the perception of beauty has become strong. Similarly with other familiar things. A labourer has not even respect for the Earth he digs; still less any such emotion as might lead him to treat it as a deity. It is true that the child may be awed by a thunderstorm and that the ignorant may look with superstitious terror at a comet; but these are not usual and orderly occurrences. Daily experiences prove that surrounding objects and powers, however vast, excite no religious emotion in undeveloped minds, if they are common and not supposed to be dangerous.

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 about them. And if their surprise is not aroused by these unfamiliar things, still less is it aroused by the things witnessed daily from birth upwards. What is more marvellous than flame?—coming no one sees whence, moving, Edition: current; Page: [836] 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 supernatural 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. What rustic asks a question as to the constitution of the Sun? When does he think about the cause of the Moon’s changes? 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 concerning 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 amongst 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” (p. 36), is said by others in kindred ways of various rude peoples. Nay, savages even ridicule as foolish, questions about the ordinary course of Nature; no matter how conspicuous the changes displayed.

Thus the intellectual factor, too, implied by the alleged mythopœic 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 erroneous assumptions is the assumption, also erroneous, that the primitive man is given to “imaginative fictions.” Here is another mistake caused by ascribing to undeveloped natures, the traits which developed natures exhibit. As shown in § 47, the savage conspicuously lacks imagination; and fiction, implying imagination, arises only as civilization progresses. The man of low type no more Edition: current; Page: [837] invents stories than he invents tools or processes; but in the one case, as in the other, the products of his activity evolve by small modifications. Among inferior races the only germ of 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 successes 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 soon become monstrously exaggerated, and in course of generations 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 preconceptions, the evidence (see Descriptive Sociology, “Æsthetic Products”) shows that there is originally no mythopœic tendency; but that the so-called myth begins with a story of human adventure. Hence this assumed factor is also wanting.

12. One more supposition is made for which there is, in like manner, no warrant. The argument of the mythologists proceeds on the assumption that early peoples were inevitably betrayed into personalizing abstract nouns. Having originally had certain verbal symbols for abstractions; and having, by implication, had a corresponding power of abstract thinking; it is alleged that the barbarian thereupon began to deprive these 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 Chips, etc. (vol. ii, p. 55), the assertion of Prof. Max Müller 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 authoritative statement is needed. And considering that the validity of the entire theory depends on the truth of this proposition, one might have looked for an elaborate demonstration of it. Surely the speech of the uncivilized should furnish abundant materials.

Instead, I find put in evidence certain personalizations of abstracts made by ourselves. Prof. Max Müller quotes passages Edition: current; Page: [838] 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 unconscious 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 personalization 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 personalization. But the evidence, instead of being direct, is remotely inferential; 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 Vedas, may be inferred from the mode of dealing with the Vedic statements. Appeal is professedly made to the ideas of highest antiquity, as being, according to theory, freest from mythopœic corruptions. But only such of these ideas as suit the hypothesis 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-Veda and the Zend-Avesta, is thereby proved to have existed before the diffusion of the Aryans. Further, as before shown (§ 178), the Rig-Veda itself calls Soma “the creator and father of the gods,” “the generator of hymns, of Dyaus, of Prithivī, of Agni, of Surya, of Indra, and of Vishnu.” 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 performing his great deeds under the inspiration of Soma. Hence if antiquity of idea, as proved both by the direct statements of the Rig-Veda itself, and by community of belief 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 Müller’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 reassured. The word dyaus, which is a cardinal word in the mythological theory, is said to be derived from the root dyu, to beam. In his Science of Language, vol. ii, p. 469, Prof. Max Müller says of it—“A root of this rich and expansive meaning would be applicable to many conceptions: the Edition: current; Page: [839] dawn, the sun, the sky, the day, the stars, the eyes, the ocean, and the meadow.” May we not add that a root so variously applicable, vague in proportion to the multiplicity of its meanings, lends itself to interpretations that are proportionately uncertain? The like holds throughout. One of the personalized Vedic gods, inferrred to have been originally a Nature-god, is the Earth. We are told that there are twenty-one Vedic names for the Earth. We learn that these names were applicable to various other things; and that consequently “earth, river, sky, dawn, cow, and speech, would become homonyms” (Chips, ii, 72). On which statements our comment may be, that as homonymous words are, by their definition, equivocal or ambiguous, translations 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 of desired results. But by as much as they afford scope for possible inferences, by so much do they diminish the probability of any one inference.*

Nor is this all. The interpretation thus made by arbitrary manipulation of ill-understood 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 protecting preceded the concrete idea of a father. On the other hand, of ancient Aryans coming after these primitive Aryans, we are told that they “could only speak and think” (ibid., 63) 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 Sun or the Sky, embracing the earth” (ibid., 64). So that the race who made their concretes out of abstracts, are described as led into these Nature-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, unsupported by evidence which existing races furnish, is not made probable by ancient evidence?

14. We need not, however, leave off simply with the conclusion that the hypothesis is unsustained. There is a definite test, which, I think, completely disproves it.

As part of the reason why abstract nouns and collective nouns became personalized, Prof. Max Müller says:—“Now in ancient languages every one of these words had necessarily a termination expressive of gender, and this naturally produced in the mind the corresponding idea of sex” (Chips, ii, 55). 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 if an abstract noun has no termination indicating a masculine or feminine nature, 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 neuter concrete. Unquestionably if a termination implying sex, and therefore implying life, therefore implies personality; where there is no termination implying sex, no implication 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. But the facts directly contradict this inference. “There are no terminations denoting gender in Quichua” (Markham, p. 23), 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. Thus personalization of the great inanimate objects and agents, can have had 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 wrong 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 Edition: current; Page: [841] as we now call pure, is directly contradicted by the evidence which the uncivilized present; and suicidally implies that there were abstract thoughts before there was even an approach to words abstract enough to convey them.

A second group of a priori reasons is otherwise derived. The mythological theory tacitly assumes that some clear division can be made between legend and history; instead of recognizing the truth that in the narratives of events there is a slowly increasing ratio of truth to error. Ignoring the necessary implication that before definite history, numerous partially-true stories must be current, it recognizes no long series of distorted traditions of actual events. And then, instead of seeing in the fact that all the leading so-called myths describe combats, evidence that they arose out of human transactions, mythologists assume that the order of Nature presents itself to the undeveloped mind in terms of victories and defeats.

Of a posteriori reasons for rejecting the theory, come, first, those embodied in denials of its premises. It is not true, as tacitly alleged, that the primitive man looks at the powers of Nature with awe. It is not true that he speculates about their characters and causes. It is not true that he has a tendency to make fictions. Every one of these alleged factors of the mythopœic process, though present in the developed mind, is absent from the undeveloped mind, where the theory assumes it.

Yet further reasons are forthcoming. From premises unwarranted by evidence, the conclusions are reached by processes which are illegitimate. It is implied that men, having originally had certain signs of abstract conceptions, and therefore power of forming such conceptions, were obliged, afterwards, to speak and think in more concrete terms—a change not simply gratuitously assumed, but exactly opposite in direction to that which the developments of thought and language actually show us. The formation of ideal persons out of abstract nouns, which is ascribed to this necessity, ought to be clearly demonstrated from the speech of existing low races, which it is not. Instead, we have deductions from an ancient Sanskrit work, unintelligible to the extent of having “seven seals,” from which conclusions called unquestionable are drawn by taking some statements and ignoring others, and by giving to words which have a score of meanings those most congruous with the desired conclusion.

Finally comes the fact which, even were the argument in general as valid as it is fallacious, would be fatal to it—the fact that personalization of natural powers, said to be suggested by verbal terminations expressive of sex, occurs just as much where there are no such terminations.