Modern Mythology | Page 3

life and personality? We explain it by the theory that man called lifeless things male or female--by using gender-terminations--as a result of his habit of regarding lifeless things as personal beings; that habit, again, being the result of his consciousness of himself as a living will.
Mr. Max Muller takes the opposite view. Man did not call lifeless things by names denoting sex because he regarded them as persons; he came to regard them as persons because he had already given them names connoting sex. And why had he done that? This is what Mr. Max Muller does not explain. He says:
'In ancient languages every one of these words' (sky, earth, sea, rain) 'had necessarily' (why necessarily?) 'a termination expressive of gender, and this naturally produced in the mind the corresponding idea of sex, so that these names received not only an individual but a sexual character.' {0a}
It is curious that, in proof apparently of this, Mr. Max Muller cites a passage from the Printer's Register, in which we read that to little children 'everything is alive. . . . The same instinct that prompts the child to personify everything remains unchecked in the savage, and grows up with him to manhood. Hence in all simple and early languages there are but two genders, masculine and feminine.'
The Printer's Register states our theory in its own words. First came the childlike and savage belief in universal personality. Thence arose the genders, masculine and feminine, in early languages. These ideas are the precise reverse of Mr. Max Muller's ideas. In his opinion, genders in language caused the belief in the universal personality even of inanimate things. The Printer's Register holds that the belief in universal personality, on the other hand, caused the genders. Yet for thirty years, since 1868, Mr. Max Muller has been citing his direct adversary, in the Printer's Register, as a supporter of his opinion! We, then, hold that man thought all things animated, and expressed his belief in gender-terminations. Mr. Max Muller holds that, because man used gender-terminations, therefore he thought all things animated, and so he became mythopoeic. In the passage cited, Mr. Max Muller does not say why 'in ancient languages every one of these words had necessarily terminations expressive of gender.' He merely quotes the hypothesis of the Printer's Register. If he accepts that hypothesis, it destroys his own theory--that gender-terminations caused all things to be regarded as personal; for, ex hypothesi, it was just because they were regarded as personal that they received names with gender-terminations. Somewhere--I cannot find the reference--Mr. Max Muller seems to admit that personalising thought caused gender-terminations, but these later 'reacted' on thought, an hypothesis which multiplies causes praeter necessitatem.
Here, then, at the very threshold of the science of mythology we find Mr. Max Muller at once maintaining that a feature of language, gender-terminations, caused the mythopoeic state of thought, and quoting with approval the statement that the mythopoeic state of thought caused gender-terminations.
Mr. Max Muller's whole system of mythology is based on reasoning analogous to this example. His mot d'ordre, as Professor Tiele says, is 'a disease of language.' This theory implies universal human degradation. Man was once, for all we know, rational enough; but his mysterious habit of using gender-terminations, and his perpetual misconceptions of the meaning of old words in his own language, reduced him to the irrational and often (as we now say) obscene and revolting absurdities of his myths. Here (as is later pointed out) the objection arises, that all languages must have taken the disease in the same way. A Maori myth is very like a Greek myth. If the Greek myth arose from a disease of Greek, how did the wholly different Maori speech, and a score of others, come to have precisely the same malady?
Mr. Max Muller alludes to a Maori parallel to the myth of Cronos. {0b} 'We can only say that there is a rusty lock in New Zealand, and a rusty lock in Greece, and that, surely, is very small comfort.' He does not take the point. The point is that, as the myth occurs in two remote and absolutely unconnected languages, a theory of disease of language cannot turn the wards of the rusty locks. The myth is, in part at least, a nature-myth--an attempt to account for the severance of Heaven and Earth (once united) by telling a story in which natural phenomena are animated and personal. A disease of language has nothing to do with this myth. It is cited as a proof against the theory of disease of language.
The truth is, that while languages differ, men (and above all early men) have the same kind of thoughts, desires, fancies, habits, institutions. It is not that in which all races formally differ--their language--but that in which all