dition exhibits in him, as in children now, the working of a feeling which endows all outward things with a life not unlike his own. Of the several objects which met his eye he had no positive knowledge, whether of their origin, their nature, or their properties. But he had life, and therefore all things else must have life also. He was under no necessity of personifying them, for he had for himself no distinctions between consciousness and personality. He knew nothing of the conditions of his own life or of any other, and there- fore all things on the earth or in the heavens were invested with the same vague idea of existence. The sun, the moon, the stars, the ground on which he trod, the clouds, storms, and lightnings were all living beings; could he help thinking that, like himself, they were conscious beings also? His very words would, by an inevitable necessity,[1] express this conviction. His language would admit no single expression from which the attribute of life was excluded, while it would vary the forms of that life with unerring instinct.[2] Every object would be a living reality, and every word a speaking picture. For him there would be no bare recurrence of days and seasons, but each morning the dawn would drive her bright flocks to the blue pastures of heaven before the birth of the lord of day from the toiling womb of night. Round the living progress of the new-born sun there would be grouped a lavish imagery, expressive of the most intense sympathy with what we term the operation of material forces, and not less expressive of the utter absence of even the faintest knowledge. Life would be an alternation of joy and sorrow, of terror and relief; for every evening the dawn would return leading her bright flocks, and the short-hved sun would die. Years might pass, or ages, before his rising again would establish even the weakest analogy;[3] but in the meanwhile man would mourn for
- ↑ I should wish to place, if possible, a stronger stress on these words now than when I wrote them some twelve or thirteen years ago. Professor Max Müller has well said that on the question, whether the growth of myths be inevitable or not, the whole problem of mythology seems to turn, and therefore that the certainty of the result cannot be too strongly insisted on. Mythology thus becomes "an inherent necessity of language," and is, "in fact, the dark shadow which language throws on thought, and which can never disappear till language becomes altogether commensurate with thought, which it never will." Mythology, then, in its highest sense is strictly "the power exercised by language on thought in every possible sphere of mental activity." It follows, of course, that the histoiy of philosophy is the history of a long battle with mythology, in which the victory of thought belongs still to "the distant future."—Selected Essays, i. 590-591.
- ↑ Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 268.
- ↑ In spite of the incredulity which one or two critics have expressed for this assertion, I see no reason for qualifying a proposition for which we have abundant evidence. See Max Müller, Selected Essays, i. 600. But even after the analogy had been established, and a sense of order had been impressed upon the mind, it was this very order which was regarded with
