Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/155

Rh MYTHOLOGY 143 not admit that language is more than a subordinate cause in the development of myths, as it seeks for the origin of myths in a given condition of thought through which all races have passed, we need do no more than record the ob jection of Professor Sayce. Our next step must be briefly to examine the intellectual condition of savages, that is, of races varying from the condition of the Andaman islanders to that of the Solomon Islanders and the ruder Red Men of the American continent. The Intellectual Condition of Savages. Nature of our Evidence. In a developed treatise on the subject of mythology it would be necessary to criticize, with a minuteness which is impossible here, our evidence for the very peculiar mental condition of the lower races. Mr Max Miiller has asked (when speaking of the mental con dition of men when myths were developed), &quot; was there a period of temporary madness through which the human mind had to pass, and was it a madness identically the same in the south of India and the north of Iceland 1 &quot; To this we may answer that the human mind had to pass through the savage stage of thought, that this stage was for all practical purposes &quot; identically the same &quot; everywhere, and that to civilized observers it does resemble &quot; a temporary madness.&quot; Many races are still abandoned to that tem porary madness ; many others which have escaped from it were observed and described while still labouring under its delusions. Our evidence for the intellectual ideas of man in the period of savagery we derive partly from the reports of voyagers, historians, missionaries, partly from an examination of the customs, institutions, and laws in which the lower races gave expression to their notions. As to the first kind of evidence, we must be on our guard against several sources of error. Where religion is con cerned, travellers in general and missionaries in particular are biased in several distinct ways. The missionary is sometimes anxious to prove that religion can only come by revelation, and that certain tribes, having received no revelation, have no religion or religious myths at all. Sometimes the missionary, on the other hand, is anxious to demonstrate that the myths of his heathen flock are a corrupted version of the Biblical narrative. In the former case he neglects the study of savage myths ; in the latter he unconsciously accommodates what he hears to what he calls &quot; the truth.&quot; The traveller who is not a missionary may either have the same prejudices, or he may be a sceptic about revealed religion. In the latter case he is perhaps unconsciously moved to put burlesque versions of Biblical stories into the mouths of his native informants, or to represent the savages as ridiculing the Scriptural traditions which he communicates to them. Yet again we must re member that the leading questions of a European inquirer may furnish a savage with a thread on which to string answers which the questions themselves have suggested. &quot; Have you ever had a great flood ? &quot; &quot; Yes.&quot; &quot; Was any one saved 1 &quot; The question starts the invention of the savage on a deluge-myth, of which, perhaps, the idea has never before entered his mind. There still remain the difficulties of all conversation between civilized men and unsophisticated savages, the tendency to hoax, and other sources of error and confusion. In receiving this kind of evidence, then, we need to know the character of our informant, his means of communicating with the heathen, his power of testing evidence, and his good faith. His testimony will have additional weight if supported by the &quot; undesigned coincidences &quot; of other evidence, ancient and modern. If Strabo and Herodotus and Pomponius Mela, for example, describe a custom, rite, or strange notion in the Old World, and if mariners and missionaries find the same notion or custom or rite in Polynesia or Australia or Kamchatka, we can scarcely doubt the truth of the reports. The evidence is best when given by ignorant men, who are astonished at meeting with an institution which ethnologists are familiar with in other parts of the world. Another method of obtaining evidence is by the comparative study of savage laws and institutions. Thus we find in Asia, Africa, America, and Australia that the marriage laws of the lower races are based on a belief in kinship with animals. The evidence for this belief is thus en tirely beyond suspicion. We find, too, that political power, sway, and social influence are based on the ideas of magic, of metamorphosis, and of the power which certain men possess to talk with the dead and to visit the abodes of death. All these ideas are the stuff of which myths are made, and the evidence of savage institutions, in every part of the world, proves that these ideas are the universal inheritance of savages. As to the quantity of evidence, it is actually overpowering in amount. /Savage Ideas about the World. We all &quot; move about in worlds not realized,&quot; though science is constantly occupied in winning over more material from the chaos of the un known to the realm of rational knowledge. Savage men are like ourselves in curiosity and anxiety causas cognoscere rerum, but with our curiosity they do not possess our powers of attention. They are as easily satisfied with an explanation of phenomena as they are eager to possess an explanation. Inevitably they furnish themselves with their philosophy out of their scanty stock of acquired ideas, and these ideas and general conceptions seem almost imbecile to civilized men. Curiosity and credulity, then, are the characteristics of the savage intellect. When a phenomenon presents itself the savage requires an explanation, and that explanation he makes for himself, or receives from tradition, in the shape of a myth. The basis of these myths, which are just as much a part of early conjectural science as of early religion, is naturally the experience of the savage as construed by himself. Man s craving to know &quot; the reason why &quot; is already &quot; among rude savages an in tellectual appetite,&quot; and &quot; even to the Australian scientific speculation has its germ in actual experience.&quot; : How does he try to satisfy this craving? Mr Tylor replies, &quot; When the attention of a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any phenomenon or custom which has to him no obvious reason, he invents and tells a story to account for it.&quot; Against this statement it has been urged that men in the lower stages of culture are not curious, but take all phenomena for granted. If there were no direct evidence in favour of Mr Tylor s opinion, it would be enough to point to the nature of savage myths themselves. It is not arguing in a circle to point out that almost all of them are nothing more than explanations of intellectual difficulties, answers to the question, How came this or that phenomenon to be what it is *? Thus savage myths answer the questions, What was the origin of the world, and of men, and of beasts 1 How came the stars by their arrangement and movements ? How are the motions of sun and moon to be accounted for? Why has this tree a red flower, and this bird a black mark on the tail 1 What was the origin of the tribal dances, or of this or that law of custom or etiquette 1 Savage mytho logy, which is also savage science, has a reply to all these and all similar questions, and that reply is always found in the shape of a story. The answers cannot be accounted for without the previous existence of the questions. We have now shown how savages come to have a mytho logy. It is their way of satisfying the early form of scientific curiosity, their way of realizing the world in which they move. But they frame their stories, neces sarily and naturally, in harmony with their general theory 1 Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 369, 1871.