. A myth means a word, but a word which, from being a name or
an attribute, has been allowed to assume a more substantial existence.
Most of the Greek, the Roman, the Indian, and other heathen gods are
nothing but poetical names, which were gradually allowed to assume a
divine personality never contemplated by their original inventors. _Eos_
was a name of the dawn before she became a goddess, the wife of
_Tithonos_, or the dying day. _Fatum_, or fate, meant originally what had
been spoken; and before Fate became a power, even greater than Jupiter, it
meant that which had once been spoken by Jupiter, and could never be
changed,--not even by Jupiter himself. _Zeus_ originally meant the bright
heaven, in Sanskrit _Dyaus_; and many of the stories told of him as the
supreme god, had a meaning only as told originally of the bright heaven,
whose rays, like golden rain, descend on the lap of the earth, the _Danae_
of old, kept by her father in the dark prison of winter. No one doubts
that _Luna_ was simply a name of the moon; but so was likewise _Lucina_,
both derived from _lucere_, to shine. _Hecate_, too, was an old name of
the moon, the feminine of _Hekatos_ and _Hekatebolos_, the far-darting
sun; and _Pyrrha_, the Eve of the Greeks, was nothing but a name of the
red earth, and in particular of Thessaly. This mythological disease,
though less virulent in modern languages, is by no means extinct.

During the Middle Ages the controversy between Nominalism and Realism,
which agitated the church for centuries, and finally prepared the way for
the Reformation, was again, as its very name shows, a controversy on
names, on the nature of language, and on the relation of words to our
conceptions on one side, and to the realities of the outer world on the
other. Men were called heretics for believing that words such as _justice_
or _truth_ expressed only conceptions of our mind, not real things walking
about in broad daylight.

In modern times the science of language has been called in to settle some
of the most perplexing political and social questions. "Nations and
languages against dynasties and treaties," this is what has remodelled,
and will remodel still more, the map of Europe; and in America comparative
philologists have been encouraged to prove the impossibility of a common
origin of languages and races, in order to justify, by scientific
arguments, the unhallowed theory of slavery. Never do I remember to have
seen science mo