ined as results of the
primitive tendency to symbolize inanimate things and their changes, by
human beings and their doings.

A kindred difficulty must be added. The change of verbal meaning from
which the myth is said to arise, is a change opposite in kind to that
which prevails in the earlier stages of linguistic development. It
implies a derivation of the concrete from the abstract; whereas at first
abstracts are derived only from concretes: the concrete of abstracts
being a subsequent process. In the words of Prof. Max Mueller, there are
"dialects spoken at the present day which have no abstract nouns, and
the more we go back in the history of languages, the smaller we find the
number of these useful expressions" (_Chips_, vol. ii., p. 54); or, as
he says more recently--"Ancient words and ancient thoughts, for both go
together, have not yet arrived at that stage of abstraction in which,
for instance, active powers, whether natural or supernatural, can be
represented in any but a personal and more or less human form."
(_Fraser's Magazine_, April, 1870.) Here the concrete is represented as
original, and the abstract as derivative. Immediately afterward,
however, Prof. Max Mueller, having given as examples of abstract nouns,
"day and night, spring and winter, dawn and twilight, storm and
thunder," goes on to argue that, "as long as people thought in language,
it was simply impossible to speak of morning or evening, of spring and
winter, without giving to these conceptions something of an individual,
active, sexual, and at last, personal character." (_Chips_, vol. ii., p.
55.) Here the concrete is derived from the abstract--the personal
conception is represented as coming _after_ the impersonal conception;
and through such transformation of the impersonal into the personal,
Prof. Max Mueller considers ancient myths to have arisen. How are these
propositions reconcilable? One of two things must be said:--If
originally there were none of these abstract nouns, then the earliest
statements respecting the daily course of Nature were made in concrete
terms--the personal elements of the myth were the primitive elements,
and the impersonal expressions which are their equivalents came later.
If this is not admitted, then it must be held that, until after there
arose these abstract nouns, there were no current statements at all
respecting these most conspicuous objects and changes which the heavens
and the earth present; and that