What opinion must his readers, who know not Mr. McLennan’s works, entertain about that acute and intrepid pioneer, a man of warm temper, I admit, a man who threw out his daringly original theory at a heat, using at first such untrustworthy materials as lay at hand, but a man whom disease could not daunt, and whom only death prevented from building a stately edifice on the soil which he was the first to explore?
Our author often returns to the weakness of the evidence of travellers and missionaries.
Concerning Missionaries
Here is an example of a vivacité in our censor. ‘With regard to ghosts and spirits among the Melanesians, our authorities, whether missionaries, traders, or writers on ethnology, are troubled by no difficulties’ (i. 207). Yet on this very page Mr. Max Müller has been citing the ‘difficulties’ which do ‘trouble’ a ‘missionary,’ Dr. Codrington. And, for my own part, when I want information about Melanesian beliefs, it is to Dr. Codrington’s work that I go. [{103}] The doctor, himself a missionary, ex hypothesi ‘untroubled by difficulties,’ has just been quoted by Mr. Max Müller, and by myself, as a witness to the difficulties which trouble himself and us. What can Mr. Max Müller possibly mean? Am I wrong? Was Dr. Codrington not a missionary? At all events, he is the authority on Melanesia, a ‘high’ authority (i. 206).
THE PHILOLOGICAL METHOD IN ANTHROPOLOGY
Mr. Max Müller as Ethnologist
Our author is apt to remonstrate with his anthropological critics, and to assure them that he also has made studies in ethnology. ‘I am not such a despairer of ethnology as some ethnologists would have me.’ He refers us to the assistance which he lent in bringing out Dr. Hahn’s Tsuni-Goam (1881), Mr. Gill’s Myths and Songs from the South Pacific (1876), and probably other examples could be added. But my objection is, not that we should be ungrateful to Mr. Max Müller for these and other valuable services to anthropology, but that, when he has got his anthropological material, he treats it in what I think the wrong way, or approves of its being so treated.
Here, indeed, is the irreconcilable difference between two schools of mythological interpretation. Given Dr. Hahn’s book, on Hottentot manners and religion: the anthropologist compares the Hottentot rites, beliefs, social habits, and general ideas with those of other races known to him, savage or civilised. A Hottentot custom, which has a meaning among Hottentots, may exist where its meaning is lost, among Greeks or other ‘Aryans.’ A story of a Hottentot god, quite a natural sort of tale for a Hottentot to tell, may be told about a god in Greece, where it is contrary to the Greek spirit. We infer that the Greeks perhaps inherited it from savage ancestors, or borrowed it from savages.
Names of Savage Gods
This is the method, and if we can also get a scholar to analyse the names of Hottentot gods, we are all the luckier, that is, if his processes and inferences are logical. May we not decide on the logic of scholars? But, just as Mr. Max Müller points out to us the dangers attending our evidence, we point out to him the dangers attending his method. In Dr. Hahn’s book, the doctor analyses the meaning of the name Tsuni-Goam and other names, discovers their original sense, and from that sense explains the myths about Hottentot divine beings.