gender-terminations.

Mr. Max Muller's whole system of mythology is based on reasoning
analogous to this example. His mot d'ordre, as Professor Tiele says, is
'a disease of language.' This theory implies universal human
degradation. Man was once, for all we know, rational enough; but his
mysterious habit of using gender-terminations, and his perpetual
misconceptions of the meaning of old words in his own language, reduced
him to the irrational and often (as we now say) obscene and revolting
absurdities of his myths. Here (as is later pointed out) the objection
arises, that all languages must have taken the disease in the same way. A
Maori myth is very like a Greek myth. If the Greek myth arose from a
disease of Greek, how did the wholly different Maori speech, and a score
of others, come to have precisely the same malady?

Mr. Max Muller alludes to a Maori parallel to the myth of Cronos. {0b}
'We can only say that there is a rusty lock in New Zealand, and a rusty
lock in Greece, and that, surely, is very small comfort.' He does not
take the point. The point is that, as the myth occurs in two remote and
absolutely unconnected languages, a theory of disease of language cannot
turn the wards of the rusty locks. The myth is, in part at least, a
nature-myth--an attempt to account for the severance of Heaven and Earth
(once united) by telling a story in which natural phenomena are animated
and personal. A disease of language has nothing to do with this myth. It
is cited as a proof against the theory of disease of language.

The truth is, that while languages differ, men (and above all early men)
have the same kind of thoughts, desires, fancies, habits, institutions.
It is not that in which all races formally differ--their language--but
that in which all early races are astonishingly the same--their ideas,