he, looking at me with surprise at my ignorance, and leading me to the door while he pointed up to the sky, 'there he is!' 'What!' said I, 'do you mean that blue sky up there?' 'Of course,' said he, 'that is Shang-te, the same as your Jesus!' I have never yet asked the above questions without receiving precisely the same answers; for all classes of Confucianists in China consider Shang-te to be the animated material heaven."1 Archdeacon Hardwick, as "Christian Advocate" in the University of Cambridge, though always learned and candid withal, wrote, in a measure, ex cathedra. His testimony, however, is of so much value that, as I shall have to refer to the subjoined passage again, I give it in full. "I am led to the conclusion that in China, as elsewhere, had lingered from primeval ages the conception of one living, bounteous, and external Providence, whose earthly shadow was believed to sit exalted. far above his fellows on the throne of the middle kingdom; but that ultimately this conception was broken and obscured until the unity of God no longer formed the basis of the Chinese creed. Philosophy then came forward as in other countries, and attempted to recover the idea of unity. Heaven' was made by the more thoughtful of philosophers a verbal representative of all the energies in nature," &c. "Many things that were true of the visible sky would be told of its divine namesake, and legends would spring up," &c. This is the next point in Professor Müller's theory that demands our study. We are here introduced to the initiatory stages of mythology. How it was that legends and myths, now incomprehensible to us, did spring up, is a matter upon which experts disagree quite as heartily as they do upon the origin of universal heaven-worship, and of religion generally. Professor Max Müller's first proposition is that, in the mythopoeic age, natural phenomena would necessarily be described as the actions of personal powers. Our ancestors, when 1 Christ and other Masters, p. 298. speaking of sunset, would inevitably say, "The sun dies," "The sun is killed by night." Where we speak of the sun following the dawn, the ancient poets could only speak and think of the sun loving and embracing the dawn. What is with us a sunset, was to them the sun growing old, decaying, or dying.1 "From simple beginnings of this kind, the fuller myth would easily and surely grow. As what was true of the sky, would be told of its Divine namesake; so, what was true of changes of the sky, or changes in the heavenly bodies, would also be told of namesakes invented for these also. By this light, many myths, which would otherwise be nonsensical, show full of meaning. In the story of Hephæstos splitting open with his axe the head of Zeus, and Athene springing from it, full armed, we perceive behind this savage imagery, Zeus as the bright sky, his forehead as the east, Hephæstos as the young, not yet risen sun, and Athene as the dawn, the daughter of the sky, stepping forth from the fountain-head of light," &c.2 The pursuit of Daphne by Apollo, and Daphne's metamorphosis into a laurel-tree at the moment the god is about to embrace her, yields to this method of interpretation. It is but the old metaphorical version of the fading of the dawn before the presence of the brilliant sun. Professor Müller quotes a poet of the Veda who says: The Dawn comes near to him-she expires as soon as he begins to breathethe mighty one irradiates the sky." He tells us that Daphne was the equivalent of Ahanâ, the Vedic name for dawn. The Greek corruption of the myth by the adjunct of the laurel-tree, is an instance of that homonymy or like-naming which plays so active a part in the formation of early myths. "The dawn was called Súpun, the burning, so was the laurel, a wood that burns easily. Afterwards the two, as usual, were supposed to be one, or to have some connection with each other," &c. Professor Müller triumphantly exclaims, "This shows the value of 1 Chips, ii. p. 66. 2 Science of Religion, p. 65. VOL. I. F the Veda for the purpose of comparative mythology, a science which, without the Veda, would have remained mere guess-work, without fixed principles and without a safe basis."1 Indeed, this is the key-note of his system. It is his specialty to have shown how language has exercised a direct influence of its own upon what he holds to be "a primitive intuition of God." As to the agency of language-of which no man living is a better. judge than himself-he goes so far as to say, " Mythology, in the highest sense, is the power exercised by language on thought in every possible sphere of mental activity," &c.2 From this condensed review of Mr. Max Müller's theory, we turn to the widely differing notions of Mr. Spencer. Here is a passage from his "Principles of Sociology," which may be taken as the text of his wellstored comment: "The first traceable conception of a supernatural being is the conception of a ghost." The soul of the fetich even, "in common with supernatural agents at large, is originally the double of a dead man.' Where there is no belief in ghosts, there is no fetichworship. Fetichism does not stand first in the order of superstitions, it is not primordial. Fetichism is "an extension of the ghost-theory." 4 Let us then explore the ghost-theory; for it is pretty clear that what Professor Müller and his school take to be " a primitive intuition of God," Mr. Spencer takes to be a secondary conception of "a permanently existing ghost." First and last we have to do with the ghost. If the savage (as Mr. Spencer declares) has no dualistic propensities, where does his spiritualism come from? The answer, in the shape of a long list of everyday experiences, is satisfactory enough. Of these experiences, dreams are amongst the earliest and most assured. The events of a dream are always related by savages as actual 2 Science of Religion, &c., p. 355. Principles of Sociology, p. 343. 1 Chips, ii. 96. 3 Vol. i. p. 305. events, and are believed to be such. Swooning, apoplexy, &c., afford similar evidence of a double existence. To all appearance, the man who faints from the effects of a wound sustained in fight, is as the dead man beside him. The soul of the first returns after long or short periods of absence: why should the soul of the other not do the same ? If reanimation follows comatose states, why should it not follow death? Insensibility is but an affair of time. All the modes of preserving the dead-drying, embalming, &c., no less than the custom of providing them with weapons, clothes, money, food, and so on,—evince the belief in casual separations of body and soul, and in the possibility of their reunion, or of their ultimate independence. Shadows and reflections have their share in the work. "To the primitive mind making first steps in the interpretation of the surrounding world, here is revealed another class of facts confirming the notion that existences have their visible and their invisible states, and strengthening the implication of a duality in each existence." 1 "The echo is regarded as the voice of some one who avoids being seen." 2 "These multitudinous disembodied men are agents ever available as conceived antecedents of all surrounding actions which need explanation.” 3 Mr. Spencer will not allow that there is any primary tendency to animism. "What," he asks, "could lead a savage to think of an inanimate object as having in it some existence besides that which his senses acquaint him with? . . . how can he imagine a second invisible entity as causing the actions of the visible entity?" 4 "The antecedent is an accumulation of ghosts and derived spirits swarming everywhere." "No other causes for such 1 Ubi supra, p. 133. 2 In Tasmania the word for shadow and for spirit is one. The Algonquin Indians call a man's soul otachuk, "his shadow;" the Quiché uses the word natub in the same way; the Arawac has but a single word ueja for the changes are known or can bẹ soul, shadow, and image; the Abi. 3 Sociology, p. 237. conceived; therefore these souls of the dead must be the causes." 1 Now for the bearing of this ghost-theory upon the outgrowth of religion: how does it affect the genesis of the myth? If all spirits, including the soul of the fetich, e.g., the soul of a stone, of a log of wood, of a tree, of a plant, or of the idol-which is but a modelled fetich-were once human souls, then, the Heaven-God himself is nothing but a disembodied man; and nature-worship resolves itself into the worship of ancestors. "The heroic Indra who delights in praise . . . is but the ancestor considerably expanded; . . . if the human derivation of Indra needs further evidence we have it in the statement concerning an intoxicating beverage made from the sacred plant the Soma exhilarates not Indra unless it be poured out;' which is exactly the belief of an African respecting the libation of beer for an ancestral ghost." Mr. Spencer grants that language is a potent factor; he grants that, "the poorer a language the more metaphorical it is;" and "being first developed to express human affairs, it carries with it certain human implications when extended to the world around, &c." Nevertheless he objects to Professor Müller's application of the linguistic influence. The powers of nature are personalised, and then worshipped. But the explanation of the personalising process is that, certain celestial phenomena and certain human beings happened to be called by the same names. "2 In Professor Müller believes that polytheism is in a great measure due to polyonymy: that the sun had scores of names, each designating some conspicuous attribute. "The sky might be called not only the brilliant, but the dark, the thundering, the covering, the rain - giving." ancient language every one of these words had necessarily a termination expressive of gender, and this naturally produced in the mind the corresponding idea of sex, so that these names received not only an individual but a 1 Sociology, pp 236, 237. 2 P. 315 |