ious of personality, will, and
life--conscious that force, when exerted by themselves, followed on a
determination of will within them--extended that explanation to all the
exhibitions of force which they beheld without them. Rivers run (early
man thought), winds blow, fire burns, trees wave, as a result of their
own will, the will of personal conscious entities. Such vitality, and
even power of motion, early man attributed even to inorganic matter, as
rocks and stones. All these things were beings, like man himself. This
does not appear to me an unnatural kind of nascent, half-conscious
metaphysics. 'Man never knows how much he anthropomorphises.' He
extended the only explanation of his own action which consciousness
yielded to him, he extended it to explain every other sort of action in
the sensible world. Early Greek philosophy recognised the stars as
living bodies; all things had once seemed living and personal. From the
beginning, man was eager causas cognoscere rerum. The only cause about
which self-consciousness gave him any knowledge was his own personal
will. He therefore supposed all things to be animated with a like will
and personality. His mythology is a philosophy of things, stated in
stories based on the belief in universal personality.

My theory of the origin of that belief is, of course, a mere guess; we
have never seen any race in the process of passing from a total lack of a
hypothesis of causes into that hypothesis of universally distributed
personality which is the basis of mythology.

But Mr. Max Muller conceives that this belief in universally distributed
personality (the word 'Animism' is not very clear) was the result of an
historical necessity--not of speculation, but of language. 'Roots were
all, or nearly all, expressive of action. . . . Hence a river could only
be called or conceived as a runner, or a roarer, or a defender; and in
all these capacities always as something active and animated, nay, as
something masculine or feminine.'

But _why_ conceived as 'masculine or feminine'? This necessity for
endowing inanimate though active things, such as rivers, with sex, is
obviously a necessity of a stage of thought wholly unlike our own. _We_
know that active inanimate things are sexless, are neuter; _we_ feel no
necessity to speak of them as male or female. How did the first speakers
of the human race come to be obliged to call lifeless things by names
connoting sex, and there