Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/311

Rh criticism and direct evidence permit us to establish its origin and antiquity, an inquiry must be made whether there exists in the beliefs of the people, where the memory of it is preserved, a sufficient explanation of its occurrence, or at least if some belief or some intellectual or imaginative peculiarity has not survived which might reveal its origin. If a loan is improbable, the myth may be ancient, and can be explained only by beliefs which were contemporaneous with it.

The innumerable myths can be reduced to a very small number of types, each of which can easily be interpreted in the study of beliefs and rites, of which it is only a dramatic fable. The aim of the psychologist is to connect these elementary beliefs with certain traits of the intellectual and emotional life of the people, and to endeavour to explain them from the conditions of existence under which these people live. The laws thus formulated will have a general value and scope on account of the singular uniformity among elementary religious beliefs, whatever the ethnic group to which they belong. No fact in the history of religion and in psychology is more important than the surprising monotony of the ideas of diverse races in all times concerning the ultimate causes of phenomena, and of the origin and destiny of man. The ideas of which myths are composed differ from one another in complexity and refinement, but it is only a question of degree; the grosser are more embryonic, later by becoming more differentiated they become more refined.

Thus is vindicated, within certain limits, the philosophical idea of the eighteenth century—the unity of the human spirit. On the one hand, one must not regard religions, like languages, as the undirected and anonymous products of the collective conscience of the people, nor on the other hand were they supernaturally founded by mysterious prodigies. Too original conceptions are condemned to disappear with those who framed them; they are doomed to a speedy death by their very originality. The great founders of religions had precursors as well as disciples.

Religious conceptions undergo a continuous and essentially identical transformation, the laws of which we are beginning to discover. Myths, dogmas, metaphysical theories or hypotheses, are the various stages which ideas and beliefs pass through. Religious sentiment and mythological conceptions, however, belong to very different orders of psychological phenomena.