MODERN MYTHOLOGY


DEDICATION


Dedicated to the memory of John Fergus McLennan.




INTRODUCTION


It may well be doubted whether works of controversy serve any useful
purpose. 'On an opponent,' as Mr. Matthew Arnold said, 'one never does
make any impression,' though one may hope that controversy sometimes
illuminates a topic in the eyes of impartial readers. The pages which
follow cannot but seem wandering and desultory, for they are a reply to a
book, Mr. Max Muller's Contributions to the Science of Mythology, in
which the attack is of a skirmishing character. Throughout more than
eight hundred pages the learned author keeps up an irregular fire at the
ideas and methods of the anthropological school of mythologists. The
reply must follow the lines of attack.

Criticism cannot dictate to an author how he shall write his own book.
Yet anthropologists and folk-lorists, 'agriologists' and 'Hottentotic'
students, must regret that Mr. Max Muller did not state their general
theory, as he understands it, fully and once for all. Adversaries rarely
succeed in quite understanding each other; but had Mr. Max Muller made