Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/310



well-known book, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, has this year been done into French by M. Marillier, who has performed his task with accuracy and elegance. There is no need to inform our readers of the scope of Mr. Lang's book; but the translator has added an interesting introduction, of which the following is a summary, mainly in the author's own words. M. Marillier, as was mentioned in our last number (p. 200), is the eminent lecturer on religions in the École Pratique des Hautes Études at Paris. He has written La Liberté de Conscience and a small but valuable and learned work, entitled La Survivance de lâme et l'idée de Justice chez les peuples non-civilisés.

M. Marillier calls attention to the destructive criticism of Mr. Lang, who came to the logical conclusion that the ancestors of the Greeks, Egyptians, and Scandinavians created their myths when their mental state was analogous to that of the Zulus or Eskimo, or they borrowed them from other people in that state; but Mr. Lang is not concerned why men, who are in the stage of evolution of the Maories or Eskimo, should have such conceptions, though this is the essential question which pervades the whole of comparative mythology. The problems of mythology are problems of psychology.

The method to be followed in these studies is at once historical and psychological. We must first ascertain whether the myth which we study is not merely a loan borrowed by the people from more or less remote neighbours; further, whether it does not bear marks of an intentional and recent fabrication, if it be not an allegory or a symbol, rather than a true myth. When internal