Chap. I. recapitulated--Proposal of a new method: Science of
comparative or historical study of man--Anticipated in part by
Eusebius, Fontenelle, De Brosses, Spencer (of C. C. C., Cambridge), and
Mannhardt--Science of Tylor--Object of inquiry: to find condition of
human intellect in which marvels of myth are parts of practical everyday
belief--This is the savage state--Savages described--The wild element of
myth a survival from the savage state--Advantages of this method--Partly
accounts for wide DIFFUSION as well as ORIGIN of myths--Connected
with general theory of evolution--Puzzling example of myth of the
water-swallower--Professor Tiele's criticism of the method--Objections
to method, and answer to these--See Appendix B.
The past systems of mythological interpretation have been briefly
sketched. It has been shown that the practical need for a reconciliation
between RELIGION and MORALITY on one side, and the MYTHS about the gods
on the other, produced the hypotheses of Theagenes and Metrodorus, of
Socrates and Euemerus, of Aristotle and Plutarch. It has been shown that
in each case the reconcilers argued on the basis of their own ideas and
of the philosophies of their time. The early physicist thought that
myth concealed a physical philosophy; the early etymologist saw in it a
confusion of language; the early political speculator supposed that myth
was an invention of legislators; the literary Euhemerus found the secret
of myths in the course of an imaginary voyage to a fabled island.
Then came the moment of the Christian attacks, and Pagan philosophers,
touched with Oriental pantheism, recognised in myths certain pantheistic
symbols and a cryptic revelation of their own Neo-platonism. When the
gods were dead and their altars fallen, then antiquaries brought their
curiosity to the problem of explaining myth. Christians recognised in it
a depraved version of the Jewish sacred writings, and found the ark on
every mountain-top of Greece. The critical nineteenth century brought
in, with Otfried Muller and Lobeck, a closer analysis; and finally, in
the sudden rise of comparative philology, it chanced that philologists
annexed the domain of myths. Each of these systems had its own amount of
truth, but each certainly failed to unravel the whole web of tradition
and of foolish faith.
Meantime a new science has come into existence, the science which
studies man in the sum of all his works and thoughts, as evolved
through the whole process of his development. This science, Comparative
Anthropology, examines the development of law out of custom; the
development of weapons from the stick or stone to the latest repeating
rifle; the development of society from the horde to the nation. It is a
study which does not despise the most backward nor degraded tribe, nor
neglect the most civilised, and it frequently finds in Australians
or Nootkas the germ of ideas and institutions which Greeks or Romans
brought to perfection, or retained, little altered from their early
rudeness, in the midst of civilisation.
It is inevitable that this science should also try its hand on
mythology. Our purpose is to employ the anthropological method--the
study of the evolution of ideas, from the savage to the barbarous, and
thence to the civilised stage--in the province of myth, ritual, and
religion. It has been shown that the light of this method had dawned on
Eusebius in his polemic with the heathen apologists. Spencer, the head
of Corpus, Cambridge (1630-93), had really no other scheme in his mind
in his erudite work on Hebrew Ritual.(1) Spencer was a student of man's
religions generally, and he came to the conclusion that Hebrew ritual
was but an expurgated, and, so to speak, divinely "licensed" adaptation
of heathen customs at large. We do but follow his guidance on less
perilous ground when we seek for the original forms of classical rite
and myth in the parallel usages and legends of the most backward races.
(1) De Legibus Hebraeorum Ritualibus, Tubingae, 1782.
Fontenelle in the last century, stated, with all the clearness of the
French intellect, the system which is partially worked out in this
essay--the system which explains the irrational element in myth as
inherited from savagery. Fontenelle's paper (Sur l'Origine des Fables)
is brief, sensible, and witty, and requires little but copious evidence
to make it adequate. But he merely threw out the idea, and left it to be
neglected.(1)
(1) See Appendix A., Fontenelle's Origine des Fables.
Among other founders of the anthropological or historical school of
mythology, De Brosses should not be forgotten. In his Dieux Fetiches
(1760) he follows the path which Eusebius indicated--the path of Spencer
and Fontenelle--now the beaten road of Tylor and M'Lennan and Mannhardt.
In anthropology, in the science of Waitz, Tylor, and M'Lennan, in
the examination of man's faith in the light of his social, legal, and
historical conditions generally, we find, with Mannhardt, some of the
keys of myth. This science "makes it manifest that the different stages
through which humanity has passed in its intellectual evolution have
still their living representatives among various existing races.
The study of these lower races is an invaluable instrument for the
interpretation of the survivals from earlier stages, which we meet in
the full civilisation of cultivated peoples, but whose origins were in
the remotest fetichism and savagery."(1)
(1) Mannhardt op. cit. p. xxiii.
It is by following this road, and by the aid of anthropology and
of human history, that we propose to seek for a demonstrably actual
condition of the human intellect, whereof the puzzling qualities of myth
would be the natural and inevitable fruit. In all the earlier theories
which we have sketched, inquirers took it for granted that the
myth-makers were men with philosophic and moral ideas like their
own--ideas which, from some reason of religion or state, they expressed
in bizarre terms of allegory. We shall attempt, on the other hand, to
prove that the human mind has passed through a condition quite unlike
that of civilised men--a condition in which things seemed natural and
rational that now appear unnatural and devoid of reason, and in which,
therefore, if myths were evolved, they would, if they survived into
civilisation, be such as civilised men find strange and perplexing.
Our first question will be, Is there a stage of human society and of
the human intellect in which facts that appear to us to be monstrous
and irrational--facts corresponding to the wilder incidents of myth--are
accepted as ordinary occurrences of everyday life? In the region of
romantic rather than of mythical invention we know that there is such
a state. Mr. Lane, in his preface to the Arabian Nights, says that the
Arabs have an advantage over us as story-tellers. They can introduce
such incidents as the change of a man into a horse, or of a woman into a
dog, or the intervention of an Afreet without any more scruple than our
own novelists feel in describing a duel or the concealment of a will.
Among the Arabs the agencies of magic and of spirits are regarded as at
least as probable and common as duels and concealments of wills seem
to be thought by European novelists. It is obvious that we need look no
farther for the explanation of the supernatural events in Arab romances.
Now, let us apply this system to mythology. It is admitted that Greeks,
Romans, Aryans of India in the age of the Sanskrit commentators, and
Egyptians of the Ptolemaic and earlier ages, were as much puzzled as
we are by the mythical adventures of their gods. But is there any
known stage of the human intellect in which similar adventures, and
the metamorphoses of men into animals, trees, stars, and all else
that puzzles us in the civilised mythologies, are regarded as possible
incidents of daily human life? Our answer is, that everything in the
civilised mythologies which we regard as irrational seems only part of
the accepted and natural order of things to contemporary savages, and in
the past seemed equally rational and natural to savages concerning whom
we have historical information.(1) Our theory is, therefore, that the
savage and senseless element in mythology is, for the most part, a
legacy from the fancy of ancestors of the civilised races who were once
in an intellectual state not higher, but probably lower, than that of
Australians, Bush-men, Red Indians, the lower races of South America,
and other worse than barbaric peoples. As the ancestors of the Greeks,
Aryans of India, Egyptians and others advanced in civilisation, their
religious thought was shocked and surprised by myths (originally dating
from the period of savagery, and natural in that period, though even
then often in contradiction to morals and religion) which were preserved
down to the time of Pausanias by local priesthoods, or which were
stereotyped in the ancient poems of Hesiod and Homer, or in the
Brahmanas and Vedas of India, or were retained in the popular religion
of Egypt. This theory recommended itself to Lobeck. "We may believe that
ancient and early tribes framed gods like unto themselves in action and
in experience, and that the allegorical softening down of myths is the
explanation added later by descendants who had attained to purer ideas
of divinity, yet dared not reject the religion of their ancestors."(2)
The senseless element in the myths would, by this theory, be for the
most part a "survival"; and the age and condition of human thought
whence it survived would be one in which our most ordinary ideas about
the nature of things and the limits of possibility did not yet exist,
when all things were conceived of in quite other fashion; the age, that
is, of savagery.
(1) We have been asked to DEFINE a savage. He cannot be defined in an
epigram, but by way of choice of a type:--
1. In material equipment the perfect savage is he who employs tools of
stone and wood, not of metal; who is nomadic rather than settled; who
is acquainted (if at all) only with the rudest forms of the arts of
potting, weaving, fire-making, etc.; and who derives more of his food
from the chase and from wild roots and plants than from any kind of
agriculture or from the flesh of domesticated animals.
2. In psychology the savage is he who (extending unconsciously to the
universe his own implicit consciousness of personality) regards all
natural objects as animated and intelligent beings, and, drawing no hard
and fast line between himself and the things in the world, is readily
persuaded that men may be metamorphosed into plants, beasts and stars;
that winds and clouds, sun and dawn, are persons with human passions
and parts; and that the lower animals especially may be creatures more
powerful than himself, and, in a sense, divine and creative.
3. In religion the savage is he who (while often, in certain moods,
conscious of a far higher moral faith) believes also in ancestral
ghosts or spirits of woods and wells that were never ancestral; prays
frequently by dint of magic; and sometimes adores inanimate objects, or
even appeals to the beasts as supernatural protectors.
4. In society the savage is he who (as a rule) bases his laws on the
well-defined lines of totemism--that is, claims descent from or other
close relation to natural objects, and derives from the sacredness of
those objects the sanction of his marriage prohibitions and blood-feuds,
while he makes skill in magic a claim to distinguished rank.
Such, for our purpose, is the savage, and we propose to explain the more
"senseless" factors in civilised mythology as "survivals" of these ideas
and customs preserved by conservatism and local tradition, or, less
probably, borrowed from races which were, or had been, savage.
(2) Aglaoph., i. 153. Had Lobeck gone a step farther and examined the
mental condition of veteres et priscae gentes, this book would have
been, superfluous. Nor did he know that the purer ideas were also
existing among certain low savages.
It is universally admitted that "survivals" of this kind do account for
many anomalies in our institutions, in law, politics, society, even in
dress and manners. If isolated fragments of earlier ages abide in these,
it is still more probable that other fragments will survive in anything
so closely connected as is mythology with the conservative religious
sentiment and tradition. Our object, then, is to prove that the "silly,
savage, and irrational" element in the myths of civilised peoples is,
as a rule, either a survival from the period of savagery, or has been
borrowed from savage neighbours by a cultivated people, or, lastly,
is an imitation by later poets of old savage data.(1) For example,
to explain the constellations as metamorphosed men, animals, or other
objects of terrestrial life is the habit of savages,(2)--a natural habit
among people who regard all things as on one level of personal life and
intelligence. When the stars, among civilised Greeks or Aryans of India,
are also popularly regarded as transformed and transfigured men, animals
and the like, this belief may be either a survival from the age when the
ancestors of Greeks and Indians were in the intellectual condition
of the Australian Murri; or the star-name and star-myth may have been
borrowed from savages, or from cultivated peoples once savage or apt to
copy savages; or, as in the case of the Coma Berenices, a poet of a late
age may have invented a new artificial myth on the old lines of savage
fancy.
(1) We may be asked why do savages entertain the irrational ideas which
survive in myth? One might as well ask why they eat each other, or
use stones instead of metal. Their intellectual powers are not fully
developed, and hasty analogy from their own unreasoned consciousness
is their chief guide. Myth, in Mr. Darwin's phrase, is one of the
"miserable and indirect consequences of our highest faculties". Descent
of Man, p. 69.
(2) See Custom and Myth, "Star-Myths".
This method of interpreting a certain element in mythology is, we must
repeat, no new thing, though, to judge from the protests of several
mythologists, it is new to many inquirers. We have seen that Eusebius
threw out proposals in this direction; that Spencer, De Brosses, and
Fontenelle unconsciously followed him; and we have quoted from Lobeck
a statement of a similar opinion. The whole matter has been stated as
clearly as possible by Mr. B. B. Tylor:--
"Savages have been for untold ages, and still are, living in the
myth-making stage of the human mind. It was through sheer ignorance and
neglect of this direct knowledge how and by what manner of men myths
are really made that their simple philosophy has come to be buried under
masses of commentator's rubbish..."(1) Mr. Tylor goes on thus (and his
words contain the gist of our argument): "The general thesis maintained
is that myth arose in the savage condition prevalent in remote ages
among the whole human race; that it remains comparatively unchanged
among the rude modern tribes who have departed least from these
primitive conditions, while higher and later civilisations, partly by
retaining its actual principles, and partly by carrying on its inherited
results in the form of ancestral tradition, continued it not merely in
toleration, but in honour".(2) Elsewhere Mr. Tylor points out that by
this method of interpretation we may study myths in various stages
of evolution, from the rude guess of the savage at an explanation of
natural phenomena, through the systems of the higher barbarisms, or
lower civilisations (as in ancient Mexico), and the sacerdotage of
India, till myth reaches its most human form in Greece. Yet even in
Greek myth the beast is not wholly cast out, and Hellas by no means "let
the ape and tiger die". That Mr. Tylor does not exclude the Aryan
race from his general theory is plain enough.(3) "What is the Aryan
conception of the Thunder-god but a poetic elaboration of thoughts
inherited from the savage stage through which the primitive Aryans had
passed?"(4)
(1) Primitive Culture, 2nd edit., i. p. 283.
(2) Op. cit., p. 275.
(3) Primitive Culture, 2nd edit., ii. 265.
(4) Pretty much the same view seems to be taken by Mr. Max Muller
(Nineteenth Century, January, 1882) when he calls Tsui Goab (whom the
Hottentots believe to be a defunct conjuror) "a Hottentot Indra or
Zeus".
The advantages of our hypothesis (if its legitimacy be admitted) are
obvious. In the first place, we have to deal with an actual demonstrable
condition of the human intellect. The existence of the savage state
in all its various degrees, and of the common intellectual habits and
conditions which are shared by the backward peoples, and again the
survival of many of these in civilisation, are indubitable facts. We are
not obliged to fall back upon some fanciful and unsupported theory of
what "primitive man" did, and said, and thought. Nay, more; we escape
all the fallacies connected with the terms "primitive man". We are not
compelled (as will be shown later)(1) to prove that the first men of all
were like modern savages, nor that savages represent primitive man.
It may be that the lowest extant savages are the nearest of existing
peoples to the type of the first human beings. But on this point it is
unnecessary for us to dogmatise. If we can show that, whether men began
their career as savages or not, they have at least passed through the
savage status or have borrowed the ideas of races in the savage
status, that is all we need. We escape from all the snares of theories
(incapable of historical proof) about the really primeval and original
condition of the human family.
(1) Appendix B.
Once more, our theory naturally attaches itself to the general system
of Evolution. We are enabled to examine mythology as a thing of gradual
development and of slow and manifold modifications, corresponding in
some degree to the various changes in the general progress of society.
Thus we shall watch the barbaric conditions of thought which produce
barbaric myths, while these in their turn are retained, or perhaps
purified, or perhaps explained away, by more advanced civilisations.
Further, we shall be able to detect the survival of the savage ideas
with least modification, and the persistence of the savage myths with
least change, among the classes of a civilised population which have
shared least in the general advance. These classes are, first, the
rustic peoples, dwelling far from cities and schools, on heaths or by
the sea; second, the conservative local priesthoods, who retain the more
crude and ancient myths of the local gods and heroes after these
have been modified or rejected by the purer sense of philosophers and
national poets. Thus much of ancient myth is a woven warp and woof of
three threads: the savage donnee, the civilised and poetic modification
of the savage donnee, the version of the original fable which survives
in popular tales and in the "sacred chapters" of local priesthoods. A
critical study of these three stages in myth is in accordance with the
recognised practice of science. Indeed, the whole system is only an
application to this particular province, mythology, of the method by
which the development either of organisms or of human institutions is
traced. As the anomalies and apparently useless and accidental features
in the human or in other animal organisms may be explained as stunted or
rudimentary survivals of organs useful in a previous stage of life, so
the anomalous and irrational myths of civilised races may be explained
as survivals of stories which, in an earlier state of thought and
knowledge, seemed natural enough. The persistence of the myths
is accounted for by the well-known conservatism of the religious
sentiment--a conservatism noticed even by Eusebius. "In later days, when
they became ashamed of the religious beliefs of their ancestors, they
invented private and respectful interpretations, each to suit himself.
For no one dared to shake the ancestral beliefs, as they honoured at a
very high rate the sacredness and antiquity of old associations, and of
the teaching they had received in childhood."(1)
(1) Praep. E., ii. 6, 19.
Thus the method which we propose to employ is in harmony both with
modern scientific procedure and with the views of a clear-sighted Father
of the Church. Consequently no system could well be less "heretical" and
"unorthodox".
The last advantage of our hypothesis which need here be mentioned is
that it helps to explain the DIFFUSION no less than the ORIGIN of the
wild and crazy element in myth. We seek for the origin of the savage
factor of myth in one aspect of the intellectual condition of savages.
We say "in one aspect" expressly; to guard against the suggestion that
the savage intellect has no aspect but this, and no saner ideas than
those of myth. The DIFFUSION of stories practically identical in every
quarter of the globe may be (provisionally) regarded as the result of
the prevalence in every quarter, at one time or another, of similar
mental habits and ideas. This explanation must not be pressed too hard
nor too far. If we find all over the world a belief that men can change
themselves and their neighbours into beasts, that belief will account
for the appearance of metamorphosis in myth. If we find a belief that
inanimate objects are really much on a level with man, the opinion
will account for incidents of myth such as that in which the wooden
figure-head of the Argo speaks with a human voice. Again, a widespread
belief in the separability of the soul or the life from the body will
account for the incident in nursery tales and myths of the "giant who
had no heart in his body," but kept his heart and life elsewhere. An
ancient identity of mental status and the working of similar mental
forces at the attempt to explain the same phenomena will account,
without any theory of borrowing, or transmission of myth, or of
original unity of race, for the world-wide diffusion of many mythical
conceptions.
But this theory of the original similarity of the savage mind everywhere
and in all races will scarcely account for the world-wide distribution
of long and intricate mythical PLOTS, of consecutive series of adroitly
interwoven situations. In presence of these long romances, found among
so many widely severed peoples, conjecture is, at present, almost
idle. We do not know, in many instances, whether such stories were
independently developed, or carried from a common centre, or borrowed by
one race from another, and so handed on round the world.
This chapter may conclude with an example of a tale whose DIFFUSION may
be explained in divers ways, though its ORIGIN seems undoubtedly savage.
If we turn to the Algonkins, a stock of Red Indians, we come on a
popular tradition which really does give pause to the mythologist. Could
this story, he asks himself, have been separately invented in widely
different places, or could the Iroquois have borrowed from the
Australian blacks or the Andaman Islanders? It is a common thing in most
mythologies to find everything of value to man--fire, sun, water--in
the keeping of some hostile power. The fire, or the sun, or the water
is then stolen, or in other ways rescued from the enemy and restored
to humanity. The Huron story (as far as water is concerned) is told by
Father Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit missionary, who lived among the Hurons
about 1636. The myth begins with the usual opposition between two
brothers, the Cain and Abel of savage legend. One of the brothers, named
Ioskeha, slew the other, and became the father of mankind (as known
to the Red Indians) and the guardian of the Iroquois. The earth was at
first arid and sterile, but Ioskeha destroyed the gigantic frog which
had swallowed all the waters, and guided the torrents into smooth
streams and lakes.(1)
(1) Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1636, p. 103 (Paris, Cramoisy,
1637).
Now where, outside of North America, do we find this frog who swallowed
all the water? We find him in Australia.
"The aborigines of Lake Tyers," remarks Mr. Brough Smyth, "say that at
one time there was no water anywhere on the face of the earth. All the
waters were contained in the body of a huge frog, and men and women
could get none of them. A council was held, and... it was agreed that
the frog should be made to laugh, when the waters would run out of his
mouth, and there would be plenty in all parts."
To make a long story short, all the animals played the jester before
the gigantic solemn frog, who sat as grave as Louis XV. "I do not like
buffoons who don't make me laugh," said that majestical monarch. At last
the eel danced on the tip of his tail, and the gravity of the prodigious
Batrachian gave way. He laughed till he literally split his sides,
and the imprisoned waters came with a rush. Indeed, many persons were
drowned, though this is not the only Australian version of the Deluge.
The Andaman Islanders dwell at a very considerable distance from
Australia and from the Iroquois, and, in the present condition of the
natives of Australia and Andaman, neither could possibly visit the
other. The frog in the Andaman version is called a toad, and he came to
swallow the waters in the following way: One day a woodpecker was eating
honey high up in the boughs of a tree. Far below, the toad was a witness
of the feast, and asked for some honey. "Well, come up here, and you
shall have some," said the woodpecker. "But how am I to climb?" "Take
hold of that creeper, and I will draw you up," said the woodpecker; but
all the while he was bent on a practical joke. So the toad got into a
bucket he happened to possess, and fastened the bucket to the creeper.
"Now, pull!" Then the woodpecker raised the toad slowly to the level of
the bough where the honey was, and presently let him down with a run,
not only disappointing the poor toad, but shaking him severely. The toad
went away in a rage and looked about him for revenge. A happy thought
occurred to him, and he drank up all the water of the rivers and lakes.
Birds and beasts were perishing, woodpeckers among them, of thirst. The
toad, overjoyed at his success, wished to add insult to the injury, and,
very thoughtlessly, began to dance in an irritating manner at his foes.
But then the stolen waters gushed out of his mouth in full volume, and
the drought soon ended. One of the most curious points in this myth is
the origin of the quarrel between the woodpecker and the toad. The same
beginning--the tale of an insult put on an animal by hauling up and
letting him down with a run--occurs in an African Marchen.(1)
(1) Brough Smyth, Aborigines of Victoria, i. 429, 430; Brinton, American
Hero Myths, i. 55. Cf. also Relations de la Nouvelle France, 1636, 1640,
1671; (Sagard, Hist. du Canada, 1636, p. 451;) Journal Anthrop. Inst.,
1881.
Now this strangely diffused story of the slaying of the frog which had
swallowed all the water seems to be a savage myth of which the more
heroic conflict of Indra with Vrittra (the dragon which had swallowed
all the waters) is an epic and sublimer version.(1) "The heavenly water,
which Vrittra withholds from the world, is usually the prize of the
contest."
(1) Ludwig, Der Rig-Veda, iii. p. 337. See postea, "Divine Myths of
India".
The serpent of Vedic myth is, perhaps, rather the robber-guardian than
the swallower of the waters, but Indra is still, like the Iroquois
Ioskeha, "he who wounds the full one".(1) This example of the wide
distribution of a myth shows how the question of diffusion, though
connected with, is yet distinct from that of origin. The advantage
of our method will prove to be, that it discovers an historical and
demonstrable state of mind as the origin of the wild element in
myth. Again, the wide prevalence in the earliest times of this mental
condition will, to a certain extent, explain the DISTRIBUTION of
myth. Room must be left, of course, for processes of borrowing and
transmission, but how Andamanese, Australians and Hurons could borrow
from each other is an unsolved problem.
(1) Gubernatis, Zoological Myth. ii. 395, note 2. "When Indra kills the
serpent he opens the torrent of the waters" (p. 393). See also Aitareya
Brahmana, translated by Haug, ii. 483.
Finally, our hypothesis is not involved in dubious theories of race. To
us, myths appear to be affected (in their origins) much less by the race
than by the stage of culture attained by the people who cherish them.
A fight for the waters between a monstrous dragon like Vrittra and a
heroic god like Indra is a nobler affair than a quarrel for the
waters between a woodpecker and a toad. But the improvement and
transfiguration, so to speak, of a myth at bottom the same is due to the
superior culture, not to the peculiar race, of the Vedic poets, except
so far as culture itself depends on race. How far the purer culture was
attained to by the original superiority of the Aryan over the Andaman
breed, it is not necessary for our purpose to inquire. Thus, on the
whole, we may claim for our system a certain demonstrable character,
which helps to simplify the problems of mythology, and to remove
them from the realm of fanciful guesses and conflicting etymological
conjectures into that of sober science. That these pretensions are not
unacknowledged even by mythologists trained in other schools is proved
by the remarks of Dr. Tiele.(1)
(1) Rev. de l'Hist. des Rel., "Le Mythe de Cronos," January, 1886. Dr.
Tiele is not, it must be noted, a thorough adherent of our theory. See
Modern Mythology: "The Question of Allies".
Dr. Tiele writes: "If I were obliged to choose between this method" (the
system here advocated) "and that of comparative philology, it is the
former that I would adopt without the slightest hesitation. This method
alone enables us to explain the fact, which has so often provoked
amazement, that people so refined as the Greeks,... or so rude, but
morally pure, as the Germans,... managed to attribute to their gods
all manner of cowardly, cruel and disorderly conduct. This method alone
explains the why and wherefore of all those strange metamorphoses
of gods into beasts and plants, and even stones, which scandalised
philosophers, and which the witty Ovid played on for the diversion of
his contemporaries. In short, this method teaches us to recognise in all
those strange stories the survivals of a barbaric age, long passed away,
but enduring to later times in the form of religious traditions, of all
traditions the most persistent.... Finally, this method alone enables us
to explain the origin of myths, because it endeavours to study them
in their rudest and most primitive shape, thus allowing their true
significance to be much more clearly apparent than it can be in the
myths (so often touched, retouched, augmented and humanised) which are
current among races arrived at a certain degree of culture."
The method is to this extent applauded by a most competent authority,
and it has been warmly accepted by a distinguished French school of
students, represented by M. Gaidoz. But it is obvious that the method
rests on a double hypothesis: first, that satisfactory evidence as to
the mental conditions of the lower and backward races is obtainable;
second, that the civilised races (however they began) either passed
through the savage state of thought and practice, or borrowed very
freely from people in that condition. These hypotheses have been
attacked by opponents; the trustworthiness of our evidence, especially,
has been assailed. By way of facilitating the course of the exposition
and of lessening the disturbing element of controversy, a reply to
the objections and a defence of the evidence has been relegated to an
Appendix.(1) Meanwhile we go on to examine the peculiar characteristics
of the mental condition of savages and of peoples in the lower and upper
barbarisms.
(1) Appendix B.