though we maintain that thought cannot exist without language
nor language without thought, we do distinguish between thought and
language, between the inward and the outward {~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER GAMMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}, between the substance
and the form. Nay, we go a step beyond. We admit that language necessarily
reacts on thought, and we see in this reaction, in this refraction of the
rays of language, the real solution of the old riddle of mythology.

You will now see why these somewhat abstruse disquisitions were necessary
for our immediate purpose, and I can promise those who have hitherto
followed me on this rather barren and rugged track, that they will now be
able to rest, and command, from the point of view which we have reached,
the whole panorama of the mythology of the human mind.

We saw just now that the names of numbers may most easily be replaced by
signs. Numbers are simple analytical conceptions, and for that very reason
they are not liable to mythology: name and conception being here
commensurate, no misunderstanding is possible. But as soon as we leave
this department of thought, mythology begins. I shall try by at least one
example to show how mythology not only pervades the sphere of religion or
religious tradition, but infects more or less the whole realm of thought.

When man wished for the first time to grasp and express a distinction
between the body and something else within him distinct from the body, an
easy name that suggested itself was _breath_. The breath seemed something
immaterial and almost invisible, and it was connected with the life that
pervaded the body, for as soon as the breath ceased, the life of the body
became extinct. Hence the Greek name {~GREEK SMALL LETTER PSI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER UPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH OXIA~},(26) which originally meant
breath, was chosen to express at first the principle of life, as
distinguished from the decaying body, afterwards the incorporeal, the
immaterial, the undecaying, the immortal part of man--his soul, his mind,
his Self. All this was very natural. When a person dies, we too say that
he has given up the ghost, and ghost, too, meant originally spirit, and
spirit meant breath.

A very instructive analogous case is quoted by Mr. E. B. Tylor from a
compendium of the theology of the India