We saw just now that the names of numbers may most easily be replaced by signs. Numbers are simple analytical conceptions, and for that very reason they are not liable to mythology: name and conception being here commensurate, no misunderstanding is possible. But as soon as we leave this department of thought, mythology begins. I shall try by at least one example to show how mythology not only pervades the sphere of religion or religious tradition, but infects more or less the whole realm of thought.
When man wished for the first time to grasp and express a distinction between the body and something else within him distinct from the body, an easy name that suggested itself was breath. The breath seemed something immaterial and almost invisible, and it was connected with the life that pervaded the body, for as soon as the breath ceased, the life of the body became extinct. Hence the Greek name ψυχή,[26] [pg 070] which originally meant breath, was chosen to express at first the principle of life, as distinguished from the decaying body, afterwards the incorporeal, the immaterial, the undecaying, the immortal part of man—his soul, his mind, his Self. All this was very natural. When a person dies, we too say that he has given up the ghost, and ghost, too, meant originally spirit, and spirit meant breath.
A very instructive analogous case is quoted by Mr. E. B. Tylor from a compendium of the theology of the Indians of Nicaragua, the record of question and answer in an inquest held by Father Francisco de Bobadilla in the early days of the Spanish conquest. Asked, among other things, concerning death, the Indians said: “Those who die in their houses go underground, but those who are killed in war go to serve the gods (teotes). When men die, there comes forth from their mouth something which resembles a person, and is called julio (Aztec yuli, ‘to live’). This being is like a person, but does not die, and the corpse remains here.” The Spanish ecclesiastics inquired whether those who go on high keep the same body, features, and limbs as here below; to which the Indians answered, “No, there is only the heart.” “But,” said the Spaniards, “as the hearts are torn out” (they meant in the case of warriors who fell into the hands of the enemy), “what happens then?” Hereupon the Indians replied: “It is not precisely the heart, but that which is in them, and makes them [pg 071] live, and which quits the body when they die;” and again they said, “It is not their heart which goes up on high, but that which makes them live, that is, the breath coming out from their mouth, which is called julio.” “Then,” asked the Spaniards, “does this heart, julio, or soul, die with the body?” “When the deceased has lived well,” replied the Indians, “the julio goes up on high with our gods; but when he has lived ill, the julio perishes with the body, and there is an end of it.”
The Greeks expressed the same idea by saying that the ψυχή had left the body,[27] had fled through the mouth, or even through a bleeding wound,[28] and had gone into Hades, which meant literally no more than the place of the Invisible (Ἁίδης). That the breath had become invisible was matter of fact; that it had gone to the house of Hades, was mythology springing spontaneously from the fertile soil of language.
The primitive mythology was by no means necessarily religious. In the very case which we have chosen, philosophical mythology sprang up by the side of religious mythology. The religious mythology consisted in speaking of the spirits of the departed as ghosts, as mere breath and air, as fluttering about the gates of Hades, or ferried across the Styx in the boat of Charon.[29]
The philosophical mythology, however, that sprang from this name was much more important. We saw that Psyche, meaning originally the breathing of the body, was gradually used in the sense of vital breath, and as something independent of the body; and that at last, when it had assumed the meaning of the immortal part of man, it retained that character of something independent of the body, thus giving rise to the conception of a soul, not only as a being without a body, but in its very nature opposed to body. As soon as that opposition had been established in language and thought, philosophy began its work in order to explain how two such heterogeneous powers could act on each other—how the soul could influence the body, and how the body could determine the soul. Spiritualistic and materialistic systems of philosophy arose, and all this in order to remove a self-created difficulty, in order to join together again what language had severed, the living body and the living soul. The question whether there is a soul or spirit, whether there is in man something different from the mere body, is not at all affected by this mythological phraseology. We certainly can distinguish between body and soul, but as long as we keep within the limits of human knowledge, we have no right to speak of the living soul as a breath, or of spirits and ghosts as fluttering about like birds or fairies. The poet of the nineteenth century says:—
“The spirit does but mean the breath,
I know no more.”
And the same thought was expressed by Cicero two thousand years ago: “Whether the soul is air or fire, I do not know.” As men, we only know of embodied spirits, however ethereal their bodies may be [pg 073] conceived to be, but of spirits, separate from body, without form or frame, we know as little as we know of thought without language, or of the Dawn as a goddess, or of the Night as the mother of the Day.
Though breath, or spirit, or ghost are the most common names that were assigned through the metaphorical nature of language to the vital, and afterwards to the intellectual, principle in man, they were by no means the only possible names. We speak, for instance, of the shades of the departed, which meant originally their shadows. Those who first introduced this expression—and we find it in the most distant parts of the world[30]—evidently took the shadow as the nearest approach to what they wished to express; something that should be incorporeal, yet closely connected with the body. The Greek εἰδῶλον, too, is not much more than the shadow, while the Latin manes meant probably in the beginning no more than the Little Ones, the Small Folk.[31] But the curious part, as showing again the influence of language on thought, an influence more powerful even than the evidence of the senses, is this, that people who speak of the life or soul as the shadow of the body, have brought themselves to believe that a dead body casts no shadow, because the shadow has departed from it; that it becomes, in fact, a kind of Peter Schlemihl.[32]