Modern Mythology | Page 8

and to Greek
philosophy.
To myself, on the other hand, it seemed that the ugly scars were
remains of that kind of taste, fancy, customary law, and incoherent
speculation which everywhere, as far as we know, prevails to various
degrees in savagery and barbarism. Attached to the 'hideous idols,' as
Mr. Max Muller calls them, of early Greece, and implicated in a ritual
which religious conservatism dared not abandon, the fables of perhaps
neolithic ancestors of the Hellenes remained in the religion and the
legends known to Plato and Socrates. That this process of 'survival' is a
vera causa, illustrated in every phase of evolution, perhaps nobody
denies.
Thus the phenomena which the philological school of mythology
explains by a disease of language we would explain by survival from a
savage state of society and from the mental peculiarities observed
among savages in all ages and countries. Of course there is nothing new
in this: I was delighted to discover the idea in Eusebius as in Fontenelle;
while, for general application to singular institutions, it was a
commonplace of the last century. {6a} Moreover, the idea had been

widely used by Dr. E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture, and by Mr.
McLennan in his Primitive Marriage and essays on Totemism.

My Criticism of Mr. Max Muller
This idea I set about applying to the repulsive myths of civilised races,
and to Marchen, or popular tales, at the same time combating the
theories which held the field--the theories of the philological
mythologists as applied to the same matter. In journalism I criticised
Mr. Max Muller, and I admit that, when comparing the mutually
destructive competition of varying etymologies, I did not abstain from
the weapons of irony and badinage. The opportunity was too tempting!
But, in the most sober seriousness, I examined Mr. Max Muller's
general statement of his system, his hypothesis of certain successive
stages of language, leading up to the mythopoeic confusion of thought.
It was not a question of denying Mr. Max Muller's etymologies, but of
asking whether he established his historical theory by evidence, and
whether his inferences from it were logically deduced. The results of
my examination will be found in the article 'Mythology' in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in La Mythologie. {6b} It did not appear
to me that Mr. Max Muller's general theory was valid, logical,
historically demonstrated, or self-consistent. My other writings on the
topic are chiefly Custom and Myth, Myth, Ritual, and Religion (with
French and Dutch translations, both much improved and corrected by
the translators), and an introduction to Mrs. Hunt's translation of
Grimm's Marchen.

Success of Anthropological Method
During fifteen years the ideas which I advocated seem to have had
some measure of success. This is, doubtless, due not to myself, but to
the works of Mr. J. G. Frazer and of Professor Robertson Smith. Both
of these scholars descend intellectually from a man less scholarly than
they, but, perhaps, more original and acute than any of us, my friend
the late Mr. J. F. McLennan. To Mannhardt also much is owed, and, of
course, above all, to Dr. Tylor. These writers, like Mr. Farnell and Mr.
Jevons recently, seek for the answer to mythological problems rather in
the habits and ideas of the folk and of savages and barbarians than in

etymologies and 'a disease of language.' There are differences of
opinion in detail: I myself may think that 'vegetation spirits,' the 'corn
spirit,' and the rest occupy too much space in the systems of Mannhardt,
and other moderns. Mr. Frazer, again, thinks less of the evidence for
Totems among 'Aryans' than I was inclined to do. {7} But it is not,
perhaps, an overstatement to say that explanation of myths by analysis
of names, and the lately overpowering predominance of the Dawn, and
the Sun, and the Night in mythological hypothesis, have received a
slight check. They do not hold the field with the superiority which was
theirs in England between 1860 and 1880. This fact--a scarcely
deniable fact--does not, of course, prove that the philological method is
wrong, or that the Dawn is not as great a factor in myth as Mr. Max
Muller believes himself to have proved it to be. Science is inevitably
subject to shiftings of opinion, action, and reaction.

Mr. Max Muller's Reply
In this state of things Mr. Max Muller produces his Contributions to the
Science of Mythology, {8} which I propose to criticise as far as it is, or
may seem to me to be, directed against myself, or against others who
hold practically much the same views as mine. I say that I attempt to
criticise the book 'as far as it is, or may seem to me to be, directed
against' us, because it is Mr. Max Muller's