Modern Mythology | Page 3

first
speakers of the human race come to be obliged to call lifeless things by
names connoting sex, and therefore connoting, not only activity, but
also 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