mythology is merely this, that the ideas of a people will be reflected
in their myths. A people which worships the dead, believes in
sorcerers and in prophets, and in metamorphosis, will have for its god
(if he can be called a god) a being who is looked on as a dead prophet
and sorcerer. He will be worshipped with such rites as dead men
receive; he will be mixed up in such battles as living men wage, and
will be credited with the skill which living sorcerers claim. All
these things meet in the legend of Tsui Goab, the 'so-called supreme
being' of the Hottentots. His connection with the dawn is not
supported by convincing argument or evidence. The relation of the dawn
to the Infinite again rests on nothing but a theory of Mr. Max
Mueller's.[195] His adversary, though recognised as the night, is
elsewhere admitted to have been, originally, a common vampire.
Finally, the Hottentots, a people not much removed from savagery, have
a mythology full of savage and even disgusting elements. And this is
just what we expect from Hottentots. The puzzle is when we find myths
as low as the story of the incest of Heitsi Eibib among the Greeks.
The reason for this coincidence is that, in Dr. Hahn's words, 'the
same objects and the same phenomena in nature will give rise to the
same ideas, whether social or mythical, among different races of
mankind,' especially when these races are in the same well-defined
state of savage fancy and savage credulity.

Dr. Hahn's book has been regarded as a kind of triumph over inquirers
who believe that ancestor-worship enters into myth, and that the purer
element in myth is the later. But where is the triumph? Even on Dr.
Hahn's own showing, ancestor-worship among the Hottentots has swamped
the adoration of the Infinite. It may be said that Dr. Hahn has at
least proved the adoration of the Infinite to be earlier than
ancestor-worship. But it has been shown that his attempt to establish
a middle stage, to demonstrate that the worshipped ancestor was really
the Red Dawn, is not logical nor convincing. Even if that middle stage
were established, it is a far cry from the worship of Dawn (supposed
by the Australians to be a woman of bad character in a cloak of red
'possum skin) to the adoration of the Infinite. Our own argument has
been successful if we have shown that there are not only two possible
schools of mythological interpretation--the Euhemeristic, led by Mr.
Spencer, and the Philological, led by Mr