Page:Grimm's Household Tales, vol.1.djvu/35

 It is the ascertained condition of the savage intellect (as stated by Sir George Cox and by anthropologists) which invests all things with personal character. Forgetfulness of meaning of words is not the cause. The processes of polyonymy, synonymy, and oblivion are superfluous as means of accounting for the personal aspect of all things in mythology. They are also (as far as we have been able to discover) processes for which no good evidence is produced.

Sir George Cox has borrowed Polyonymy and its effects from Mr. Müller, though he gives no evidence to prove that it was ever a large factor in mythology. At first the processes of polyonymy and oblivion seem superfluous in Sir George's system, because he has already (in the intellectual condition of his primary myth-makers) sufficient myth-making power. While his early men regarded all things as living and personal, they would account for all natural processes on that hypothesis, and the explanations thus given would be nature-myths of the class current among savages. For example, if Sir George's early men thought (as they did) that the sun was alive, they might well marvel at the regularity of his movements; why did he not run about the sky at random as a brute runs about the woods? Why did he go, like a driven beast, in a regular round? To answer this question the New Zealanders and North American Indians have evolved a story that Maui or Tcha-ka-betch once set traps for the sun, caught him, beat him, and made him move for the future with orderly propriety. This is an undeniable nature-myth, and savage mythology, like that of Greece and of the Veda, is full of similar mythic explanations of natural phenomena. To explain such myths no processes of polyonymy, synonymy, and oblivion are needed. Why then are those processes required in the system of Sir George Cox? For this reason; he is not content with the