Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/293

Rh an era in current religious thought which, if only people would study in the same spirit with which Mr. Clodd writes, would effectually root out much of the mediævalism and paganised ritual and fancy which so disfigures modern religious practice and belief. Mr. Clodd puts his finger with unerring decisiveness upon many an item of superstition, of crude, unadulterated myth, which has got mixed up with the beliefs of the age; and yet, if we mistake not, he leaves behind a very solid and healthy superstructure of earnest faith and robust belief which it would harm no orthodoxy to cling to or no scientific mind to accept.

But the main point to which we wish to direct attention is its value to folk-lorists. First of all it seems to us to effectively settle the true definition and scope of myth. In "myth lie the germs of philosophy, theology, and science, the beginnings of all knowledge that man has attained, or ever will attain, and, therefore, in myth we have his serious endeavour to interpret the meaning of his surroundings and of his own action and feelings "Man," says Mr. Clodd, "wondered before he reasoned; awe and fear are quick to express themselves in rudimentary worship; hence the myth was at the outset a theology, and the gradations from personifying to deifying are too great to be expressed." This is the whole sum and substance of Mr. Clodd's book. He points out how the comparative mythologists missed the mark when they explained the extraordinary phenomenon of tales and legends existing throughout the world unaided by literature or by natural intercourse, and yet alike in substance, and many alike in detail, to be the interpretation by early man of his ideas of the sun, moon, and dawn. Man took into his wonder-creating mind many other natural phenomena than the sun. As far as in him lay he observed all nature. He felt himself an essential part of this nature, and he therefore gave to the various forces and forms of it a personification which he felt himself to possess. If there was motion, there was life; if there was life it must be personal life, was his argument, With this key-note to the mental attitude of early man, Mr. Clodd works out many interesting problems relating to myths of the sun and moon, the stars, the earth, and sky, storms and lightning, light and dark-