Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/187

 names. The Hebrew and Teuton heard without surprise that the eponymous ancestor of the human race was "Man" (âdâm, mannus), because the difference between a general idea and an individual name was not yet conceived with any distinctness, because, in fact, the sense of personality was not sufficiently developed to admit of such distinctness. In the same way the phenomena of Nature are expressed in the terms of human existence, as it was then conceived, without either the desire or the ability to personify Nature in our modern sense. The early confusion of human and physical existence is, in fact, only an extension of that confusion of personal with social existence which so strikingly characterises the clan age. Both proceed from a condition of thought in which personal and collective, subjective and objective, abstract and concrete forms of being are confused; and the source of this confusion is to be largely discovered in the communal organisation of early social life.

Viewed in this light we may regard the work of myth-making as the peculiar function of the clan age; and the relations of the clan to myth are alike visible in the social and the physical aspects of myth-making. "Myth" (a word which had no fixed value among the Greeks, fables of invention, like the Choice of Hercules, and divine traditions of prehistoric origin being lumped together under the vague term mûthos) would seem to be now tacitly used by those who profess any accuracy of language to mean creations of imagination unconsciously working upon external nature; and philological scholars in England and Germany have sometimes displayed a tendency to narrow the term still farther, and make myths little more than a disease of language. But the makers of myth are really the narrow limits within which man's primitive action and thought are bound up; just