on, though not newly
announced, were at least brought home to the reader with such an amount
of fresh and striking concrete illustration as they had not before
received. Yet it must have occurred to more than one reader that, while
the analyses of myths contained in this noble essay are in the main
sound in principle and correct in detail, nevertheless the author's
theory of the genesis of myth is expressed, and most likely conceived,
in a way that is very suggestive of carelessness and fallacy. There are
obvious reasons for doubting whether the existence of mythology can be
due to any "disease," abnormity, or hypertrophy of metaphor in language;
and the criticism at once arises, that with the myth-makers it was not
so much the character of the expression which originated the thought,
as it was the thought which gave character to the expression. It is not
that the early Aryans were myth-makers because their language abounded
in metaphor; it is that the Aryan mother-tongue abounded in metaphor
because the men and women who spoke it were myth-makers. And they were
myth-makers because they had nothing but the phenomena of human will and
effort with which to compare objective phenomena. Therefore it was that
they spoke of the sun as an unwearied voyager or a matchless archer,
and classified inanimate no less than animate objects as masculine and
feminine. Max Muller's way of stating his theory, both in this Essay
and in his later Lectures, affords one among several instances of the
curious manner in which he combines a marvellous penetration into the
significance of details with a certain looseness of general conception.
[155] The principles of philological interpretation are an indispensable
aid to us in detecting the hidden meaning of many a legend in which the
powers of nature are represented in the guise of living and thinking
persons; but before we can get at the secret of the myth-making tendency
itself, we must leave philology and enter upon a psychological study.
We must inquire into the characteristics of that primitive style of
thinking to which it seemed quite natural that the sun should be an
unerring archer, and the thunder-cloud a black demon or gigantic robber
finding his richly merited doom at the hands of the indignant Lord of
Light.

Among recent treatises which have dealt with this interesting problem,
we shall find it advantageous to give especial attention to Mr. Tylor's
"Primitive Culture," [156] one o