A Lecture Delivered At The Royal Institution In 1871.
What can be in our days the interest of mythology? What is it to us that
Kronos was the son of Uranos and Gaia, and that he swallowed his children,
Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Pluton, and Poseidon, as soon as they were born?
What have we to do with the stories of Rhea, the wife of Kronos, who, in
order to save her youngest son from being swallowed by his father, gave
her husband a stone to swallow instead? And why should we be asked to
admire the exploits of this youngest son, who, when he had grown up, made
his father drink a draught, and thus helped to deliver the stone and his
five brothers and sisters from their paternal prison? What shall we think
if we read in the most admired of classic poets that these escaped
prisoners became afterwards the great gods of Greece, gods believed in by
Homer, worshipped by Sokrates, immortalized by Pheidias? Why should we
listen to such horrors as that Tantalos killed his own son, boiled him,
and placed him before the gods to eat? or that the gods collected his
limbs, threw them into a cauldron, and thus restored Pelops to life,
_minus_, however, his shoulder, which Demeter had eaten in a fit of
absence, and which had therefore to be replaced by a shoulder made of
ivory?
Can we imagine anything more silly, more savage, more senseless, anything
more unworthy to engage our thoughts, even for a single moment? We may
pity our children that, in order to know how to construe and understand
the master-works of Homer and Virgil, they have to fill their memory with
such idle tales; but we might justly suppose that men who have serious
work to do in this world would banish such subjects forever from their
thoughts.
And yet, how strange, from the very childhood of philosophy, from the
first faintly-whispered Why? to our own time of matured thought and
fearless inquiry, mythology has been the ever-recurrent subject of anxious
wonder and careful study. The ancient philosophers, who could pass by the
petrified shells on mountain-tops and the fossil trees buried in their
quarries without ever asking the question how they came to be there, or
what they signified, were ever ready with doubts and surmises when they
came to listen to ancient stories of their gods and heroes. And, more
curious still, even modern philosophers cannot resist the attraction of
these ancient problems. That stream of philosophic thought which,
springing from Descartes (1596-1650), rolled on through the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries in two beds—the _idealistic_, marked by the names
of Malebranche (1638-1715), Spinoza (1632-1677), and Leibniz (1646-1716);
and the _sensualistic_, marked by the names of Locke (1632-1704), David
Hume (1711-1776), and Condillac (1715-1780), till the two arms united
again in Kant (1724-1804), and the full stream was carried on by Schelling
(1775-1854), and Hegel (1770-1831),—this stream of modern philosophic
thought has ended where ancient philosophy began—in a Philosophy of
Mythology, which, as you know, forms the most important part of
Schelling’s final system, of what he called himself his _Positive
Philosophy_, given to the world after the death of that great thinker and
poet, in the year 1854.
I do not mean to say that Schelling and Aristotle looked upon mythology in
the same light, or that they found in it exactly the same problems; yet
there is this common feature in all who have thought or written on
mythology, that they look upon it as something which, whatever it may
mean, does certainly not mean what it seems to mean; as something that
requires an explanation, whether it be a system of religion, or a phase in
the development of the human mind, or an inevitable catastrophe in the
life of language.
According to some, mythology is history changed into fable; according to
others, fable changed into history. Some discover in it the precepts of
moral philosophy enunciated in the poetical language of antiquity; others
see in it a picture of the great forms and forces of nature, particularly
the sun, the moon, and the stars, the changes of day and night, the
succession of the seasons, the return of the years—all this reflected by
the vivid imagination of ancient poets and sages.
Epicharmos, for instance, the pupil of Pythagoras, declared that the gods
of Greece were not what, from the poems of Homer, we might suppose them to
be—personal beings, endowed with superhuman powers, but liable to many of
the passions and frailties of human nature. He maintained that these gods
were really the Wind, the Water, the Earth, the Sun, the Fire, and the
Stars. Not long after his time, another philosopher, Empedokles, holding
that the whole of nature consisted in the mixture and separation of the
four elements, declared that Zeus was the element of Fire, Here the
element of Air, Aidoneus or Pluton the element of Earth, and Nestis the
element of Water. In fact, whatever the free thinkers of Greece discovered
successively as the first principles of Being and Thought, whether the air
of Anaximenes, or the fire of Herakleitos, or the Nous or Mind of
Anaxagoras, was readily identified with Zeus and the other divine persons
of Olympian mythology. Metrodoros, the contemporary of Anaxagoras, went
even farther. While Anaxagoras would have been satisfied with looking upon
Zeus as but another name of his Nous, the highest intellect, the mover,
the disposer, the governor of all things, Metrodoros resolved not only the
persons of Zeus, Here, and Athene, but likewise those of human kings and
heroes—such as Agamemnon, Achilles, and Hektor—into various combinations
and physical agencies, and treated the adventures ascribed to them as
natural facts hidden under a thin veil of allegory.
Sokrates, it is well known, looked upon such attempts at explaining all
fables allegorically as too arduous and unprofitable: yet he, too, as well
as Plato, pointed frequently to what they called the _hypónoia_, the
under-current, or, if I may say so, the under-meaning of ancient
mythology.