the noun _svar_, meaning
sometimes the sky, sometimes the sun; and exactly the same word has been
preserved in Latin, as _sol_; in Gothic as _sauil_; in Anglo-Saxon, as
_sol_. A secondary form of _svar_ is the Sanskrit _surya_ for _svarya_,
the sun, which is the same word as the Greek {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH DASIA AND OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}.

All these names were originally mere predicates; they meant bright,
brilliant, warm. But as soon as the name _svar_ or _surya_ was formed, it
became, through the irresistible influence of language, the name, not only
of a living, but of a male being. Every noun in Sanskrit must be either a
masculine or a feminine (for the neuter gender was originally confined to
the nominative case), and as _surya_ had been formed as a masculine,
language stamped it once for all as the sign of a male being, as much as
if it had been the name of a warrior or a king. In other languages where
the name for sun is a feminine, and the sun is accordingly conceived as a
woman, as a queen, as the bride of the moon, the whole mythology of the
love-making of the heavenly bodies is changed.

You may say that all this shows, not so much the influence of language on
thought, as of thought on language; and that the sexual character of all
words reflects only the peculiarities of a child's mind, which can
conceive of nothing except as living, as male or female. If a child hurts
itself against a chair, it beats and scolds the chair. The chair is looked
upon not as _it_, but as _he_; it is the naughty chair, quite as much as a
boy is a naughty boy. There is some truth in this, but it only serves to
confirm the right view of the influence of language on thought; for this
tendency, though in its origin intentional, and therefore the result of
thought, became soon a mere rule of tradition in language, and it then
reacted on the mind with irresistible power. As soon, in fact, as _suryas_
or {~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH DASIA AND OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~} appears as a masculine, we are in the very thick of mythology. We
have not yet arrived at Helios as a god--that is a much later stage of
thought, which we might describe almost in the words of Plato at the
beginning of the seventh book of the "Republic," "And after th