'Even Mr. A. Lang has to admit that we have not got much beyond
Fontenelle, when he wrote in the last century:
'"Why are the legends [myths] about men, beasts, and gods so wildly
incredible and revolting? . . . The answer is that the earliest men
were in a state of almost inconceivable ignorance and savagery, and
that the Greeks inherited their myths from people in the same savage
stage (en un pareil etat de sauvagerie). Look at the Kaffirs and
Iroquois if you want to know what the earliest men were like, and
remember that the very Iroquois and Kaffirs have a long past behind
them"'--that is to say, are polite and cultivated compared to the
earliest men of all.
Here is an uncompromising statement by Fontenelle of the postulate that
the Greeks (an Aryan people) must have passed through the same stage as
modern savages--Kaffirs and Iroquois--now occupy. But (i. 15) Mr. Max
Muller eagerly accepts the postulate:--
'There is not a word of Fontenelle's to which I should not gladly
subscribe; there is no advice of his which I have not tried to follow
in all my attempts to explain the myths of India and Greece by an
occasional reference to Polynesian or African folklore.'
Well, if Mr. Max Muller 'gladly subscribes,' in p. 15, to the postulate
of an original universal stage of savagery, whence civilised races
inherit their incredibly repulsive myths, why, in pp. 197, 198, does he
denounce that very postulate as not proven, not capable of being proved,
very mischievous, and one of the evils resulting from our method of
comparing savage and civilised rites and beliefs? I must be permitted to
complain that I do not know which is Mr. Max Muller's real opinion--that
given with such hearty conviction in p. 15, or that stated with no less
earnestness in pp. 197, 198. I trust that I shall not be thought to
magnify a mere slip of the pen. Both passages--though, as far as I can
see, self-contradictory--appear to be written with the same absence of
levity. Fontenelle, I own, speaks of Greeks, not Semites, as being
originally savages. But I pointed out {124} that he considered it safer
to 'hedge' by making an exception of the Israelites. There is really
nothing in Genesis against the contention that the naked, tool-less,
mean, and frivolous Adam was a savage.