Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/153

MYTHOLOGY 141 of intellect was enough for the genesis of myths, without the conjectured reaction of language. (5.) The elaborate theory of the persistence of phrases without meaning in language is inconsistent with all that Mr Miiller has told us about the civilization of Mythopoeic man. He belonged to a settled society, with a literature of its own. No proof is given that men so advanced in civilization would forget the meanings of ordinary phrases and yet retain the phrases in their language, How could a society with such shifting speech develop " by literary wear and tear " a system of decimal arithmetic ? But Mr Miiller says that the rapid process of oblivion which begat myths might occur in four generations. (6.) Again, no proof is given of the existence of the processes called homonymy and polyonymy. Mr Miiller, by way of proof, quotes the Vedas, artificial poems pro duced in a language which did not even exist in what he calls the Mythopoeic age. An Englishman might as well illustrate the conversation of his ancestors by examples chosen from Hymns Ancient and Modern. Mr Miiller gives instances of homonymy and polyonymy in the Vedas, but he does not show that these processes made it impossible for the descendants of the Vedic poets to know what they were talking about. He says the descendants of Mytho poeic men did not know what their traditional phrases meant, but he advances no proof that Mythopoeic men used the processes called homonymy and polyonymy. Finally, when he looks for illustrations, he finds them, not in the Mytho poeic period at all, but in the established national languages of the Greeks and of the Aryans of India. And in these illustrations the very points which most demand explana tion the "silly, senseless, and savage" details are left not only unexplained but almost untouched. Thus Mr Miiller s theory that myths are " a disease of language " seems destitute of evidence, and inconsistent with what is histori cally known about the relations between the language and the social, political, and literary condition of men. Theory of Mr Herbert, Spencer.- The system of Mr Herbert Spencer, as explained in Principles of Sociology, has many points in common with that of Mr Miiller. Mr Spencer attempts to account for the state of mind (the foundation of myths) in which man personifies and ani mates all phenomena. According to his theory, too, this habit of mind may be regarded as the result of degenera tion, for in his view, as in Mr Miiller s, it is not primary, but the result of misconceptions. But, while language is the chief cause of misconceptions with Mr Miiller, with Mr Spencer it is only one of several forces all working to the same result. Statements which originally had a different significance are misinterpreted, he thinks, and names of human beings are also misinterpreted in such a manner that early races are gradually led to believe in the person ality of phenomena. He too notes " the defect in early speech " that is, the " lack of words free from implica tions of vitality " as one of the causes which " favour per sonalization." Here, of course, we have to ask Mr Spencer, as we asked Mr Miiller, ivhy words in early languages " imply vitality." These words must reflect the thought of the men who use them before they react upon that thought and confirm it in its misconceptions. So far Mr Spencer seems at one with the philological school of mytho- logists, but he warns us that the misconstructions of language in his system are "different in kind, and the erroneous course of thought is opposite in direction." According to Mr Spencer (and his premises, at least, are correct), the names of human beings in an early state of society are derived from incidents of the moment, and often refer to the period of the day, or the nature of the weather. We find, among Australian natives, among Abipones in South America, and among Ojibways in the North, actual people named Dawn, Gold Flower of Day, Dark Cloud, Sun, and so forth. Mr Spencer s argument is that, given a story about real people so named, in process of time and forgetfulness the anecdote which was once current about a man named Storm and a woman named Sunshine will be transferred to the meteorological phenomena of sun and tempest. Thus these purely natural agents will come to be "personalized" (Prin. Soc., 392), and to be credited with purely human origin and human adventures. Another misconception would arise when men had a tradition that they came to their actual seats from this mountain, or that lake or river, or from lands across the sea. They will mistake this tradition of local origin for one of actual parentage, and will come to believe that, like certain Homeric heroes, they are the sons of a river (now personified), or of a mountain, or, like a tribe mentioned by Garcilasso de la Vega, that they are descended from the sea. Once more, if their old legend told them that they came from the rising sun, they will hold, like many races, that they are actually the children of the sun. By this process of forgetfulness and misinterpretation, mountains, rivers, lakes, sun, and sea would receive human attributes, while men would degenerate from a more sen sible condition into a belief in the personality and vitality of inanimate objects. As Mr Spencer thinks ancestor- worship the first form of religion, and as he holds that per sons with such names as sun, moon, and the like became worshipped as ancestors, his theory results in the belief that nature-worship and the myths about natural pheno mena dawn, wind, sky, night, and the rest are a kind of transmuted worship of ancestors and transmuted myths about real men and women. " Partly by confounding the parentage of the race with a conspicuous object marking the natal region of the race, partly by literal interpretation of birth names, and partly by literal interpretation of names given in eulogy " (such as Sun and Bull, among the Egyptian kings), and also through "implicit belief in the statements of forefathers," there has been produced belief in descent from mountains, sea, dawn, from animals which have become constellations, and from persons once on earth who now appear as sun and moon. A very common class of myths assures us that certain stocks of men are descended from beasts, or from gods in the shape of beasts. Mr Spencer explains these by the theory that the remembered ancestor of a stock had, as savages often have, an animal name, as Bear, Wolf, Coyote, or what not. In time his descendants came to forget that the name was a mere name, and were misled into the opinion that they were children of a real coyote, wolf, or bear. This idea, once current, would naturally stimulate and diffuse the belief that such descents were possible, and that the animals are closely akin to men. The chief objection to these processes is that they require, as a necessary condition, a singular amount of memory on the one hand and of forgetfulness on the other. The lowest contemporary savages remember little or nothing of any ancestor farther back than the grandfather. But men in Mr Spencer s Mythopoeic age had much longer memories. On the other hand, the most ordinary savage does not misunderstand so universal a custom as the imposition of names peculiar to animals or derived from atmospheric phenomena. He calls his own child Dawn or Cloud, his own name is Sitting Bull or Running Wolf, and he is not tempted to explain his great-grandfather s name of Bright Sun or Lively Raccoon on the hypothesis that the ancestor really was a raccoon or the sun. Moreover, savages do not worship ancestresses or retain lively memories of their great-grandmothers, yet it is through the female line in the majority of cases that the animal or other ancestral name is derived. The son of an Australian whose family