rench intellect, the system which is partially worked out in this
essay--the system which explains the irrational element in myth as
inherited from savagery. Fontenelle's paper (Sur l'Origine des Fables)
is brief, sensible, and witty, and requires little but copious evidence
to make it adequate. But he merely threw out the idea, and left it to be
neglected.(1)

(1) See Appendix A., Fontenelle's Origine des Fables.

Among other founders of the anthropological or historical school of
mythology, De Brosses should not be forgotten. In his Dieux Fetiches
(1760) he follows the path which Eusebius indicated--the path of Spencer
and Fontenelle--now the beaten road of Tylor and M'Lennan and Mannhardt.

In anthropology, in the science of Waitz, Tylor, and M'Lennan, in
the examination of man's faith in the light of his social, legal, and
historical conditions generally, we find, with Mannhardt, some of the
keys of myth. This science "makes it manifest that the different stages
through which humanity has passed in its intellectual evolution have
still their living representatives among various existing races.
The study of these lower races is an invaluable instrument for the
interpretation of the survivals from earlier stages, which we meet in
the full civilisation of cultivated peoples, but whose origins were in
the remotest fetichism and savagery."(1)

(1) Mannhardt op. cit. p. xxiii.

It is by following this road, and by the aid of anthropology and
of human history, that we propose to seek for a demonstrably actual
condition of the human intellect, whereof the puzzling qualities of myth
would be the natural and inevitable fruit. In all the earlier theories
which we have sketched, inquirers took it for granted that the
myth-makers were men with philosophic and moral ideas like their
own--ideas which, from some reason of religion or state, they expressed
in bizarre terms of allegory. We shall attempt, on the other hand, to
prove that the human mind has passed through a condition quite unlike
that of civilised men--a condition in which things seemed natural and
rational that now appear unnatural and devoid of reason, and in which,
therefore, if myths were evolved, they would, if they survived into
civilisation, be such as civilised men find strange and perplexing.

Our first question will be, Is there a stage of human society and of
the human intellect in which facts that appear to us to be monstrous
and irrational--f