Page:Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders of the Indo-European Languages.djvu/25

Rh in the concrete than we moderns. But "concrete thinking" does not mean to consider as man or beast something which is not concrete, but which is in its very essence abstract. Animalization and personification, like poetry, have their origin in fantastic, exalted feeling, and there never has been a time when man stood continually on such a poetic height. Every-day life is hard and prosaic in modern times, and still more stern and prosaic was it in those primitive days to which Grimm's theory carries us back. Aside from this, the creative imagination of man produces not only anthropomorphic and theriomorphic beings, but also inanimate, material metaphors. The cloud floating across the heavens, for example, is looked upon in mythology as an animate being, as a giant, but is also considered as a garment of air, a cloak, or something similar. Why should one think that primitive man overloaded language with personal metaphors instead of impersonal? And, thirdly, each particular thing, even if it is animalized, is not necessarily at the same time sexualized. Very often our imagination discovers in a lifeless object attributes of a person, and for the moment, or for a longer time, personifies this object, and forms out of it a living being. But it is not