The general problem at issue is apt to be lost sight of in this guerilla
kind of warfare. It is perhaps more distinctly stated in the preface to
Mr. Max Muller's Chips from a German Workshop, vol. iv. (Longmans, 1895),
than in his two recent volumes. The general problem is this: Has
language--especially language in a state of 'disease,' been the great
source of the mythology of the world? Or does mythology, on the whole,
represent the survival of an old stage of thought--not caused by
language--from which civilised men have slowly emancipated themselves?
Mr. Max Muller is of the former, anthropologists are of the latter,
opinion. Both, of course, agree that myths are a product of thought, of
a kind of thought almost extinct in civilised races; but Mr. Max Muller
holds that language caused that kind of thought. We, on the other hand,
think that language only gave it one means of expressing itself.

The essence of myth, as of fairy tale, we agree, is the conception of the
things in the world as all alike animated, personal, capable of endless
interchanges of form. Men may become beasts; beasts may change into men;
gods may appear as human or bestial; stones, plants, winds, water, may
speak and act like human beings, and change shapes with them.

Anthropologists demonstrate that the belief in this universal kinship,
universal personality of things, which we find surviving only in the
myths of civilised races, is even now to some degree part of the living
creed of savages. Civilised myths, then, they urge, are survivals from a
parallel state of belief once prevalent among the ancestors of even the
Aryan race. But how did this mental condition, this early sort of false
metaphysics, come into existence? We have no direct historical
information on the subject. If I were obliged to offer an hypothesis, it
would be that early men, conscious of personality, will, and
life--conscious that force, when exerted by themselves, followed on a