But _why_ conceived as 'masculine or feminine'? This necessity for
endowing inanimate though active things, such as rivers, with sex, is
obviously a necessity of a stage of thought wholly unlike our own. _We_
know that active inanimate things are sexless, are neuter; _we_ feel no
necessity to speak of them as male or female. How did the first speakers
of the human race come to be obliged to call lifeless things by names
connoting sex, and therefore connoting, not only activity, but also life
and personality? We explain it by the theory that man called lifeless
things male or female--by using gender-terminations--as a result of his
habit of regarding lifeless things as personal beings; that habit, again,
being the result of his consciousness of himself as a living will.

Mr. Max Muller takes the opposite view. Man did not call lifeless things
by names denoting sex because he regarded them as persons; he came to
regard them as persons because he had already given them names connoting
sex. And why had he done that? This is what Mr. Max Muller does not
explain. He says:

'In ancient languages every one of these words' (sky, earth, sea, rain)
'had necessarily' (why necessarily?) 'a termination expressive of gender,
and this naturally produced in the mind the corresponding idea of sex, so
that these names received not only an individual but a sexual character.'
{0a}

It is curious that, in proof apparently of this, Mr. Max Muller cites a
passage from the Printer's Register, in which we read that to little
children '_everything_ is _alive_. . . . The same instinct that prompts
the child to personify everything remains unchecked in the savage, and
grows up with him to manhood. Hence in all simple and early languages