of the Aryans were in the
imaginative condition in which a score of rude races are to-day. This
explanation they apply to many other irrational elements in mythology.
They do not say 'Something like the events narrated in these stories
once occurred,' nor 'A disease of language caused the belief in such
events,' but 'These stories were invented when men were capable of
believing in their occurrence as a not unusual sort of incident.'

Philologists attempt to explain the metamorphoses as the result of
some oblivion and confusion of language. Apollo, they say, was called
the 'wolf-god' (Lukeios) by accident: his name really meant the 'god
of light.' A similar confusion made the 'seven shiners' into the
'seven bears.' These explanations are distrusted, partly because the
area to be covered by them is so vast. There is scarcely a star, tree,
or beast, but it has been a man or woman once, if we believe civilised
and savage myth. Two or three possible examples of myths originating
in forgetfulness of the meaning of words, even if admitted, do not
explain the incalculable crowd of metamorphoses. We account for these
by saying that, to the savage mind, which draws no hard and fast line
between man and nature, all such things are possible; possible enough,
at least, to be used as incidents in story. Again, as has elsewhere
been shown, the laxity of philological reasoning is often quite
extraordinary; while, lastly, philologists of the highest repute
flatly contradict each other about the meaning of the names and roots
on which they agree in founding their theory.[188]

By way of an example of the philological method as applied to savage
mythology, we choose a book in many ways admirable, Dr. Hahn's _Tsuni
Goam, the Supreme Being of the Khoi Khoi_.[189] This book is sometimes
appealed to as a crushing argument against the mythologists who adopt
the method we have just explained. Let us see if the blow be so very
crushing. To put the case in a nutshell, the Hottentots have commonly
been described as a race which worshipped a dead chief, or
conjurer--Tsui Goab his name is, meaning Wounded Knee, a not unlikely
name for a savage. Dr. Hahn, on the other hand, labours to show that
the Hottentots originally worshipped no dead chief, but (as a symbol
of the Infinite) the Red Dawn. The meaning of the name Red Dawn, he
says, was lost; the words which meant Red Dawn were erroneously
supposed to mean Wounded Knee, and thus arose the adorat