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.