[1098]. A dozen years ago or more, a professor lecturing on this subject in a German university, after giving all the myths about a certain goddess, spoke somewhat as follows: “Gentlemen, this goddess is either a star or the early summer grass, I am not certain which. I am studying the matter carefully, and hope soon to reach a positive conclusion.”
[1099]. Compare Lucretius, dealing now lovingly with the Venus of myth—alma Venus, the beloved of Rome’s own god—and now, a few lines below, scornfully, passionately, with the cruel rites of the worship of Diana and the sacrifice of Iphigenia at her shrine: “illa Religio,” he says, with a touch almost of blasphemy.
[1100]. See the chapters on animism and mythology in Tylor’s Primitive Culture. A. W. Schlegel was on this trail, but let himself be befogged by Schelling’s philosophy. See the Vorlesungen, I. 329, 337.
[1101]. See his Germanische Mythen.
[1102]. Mythologische Forschungen (Quellen u. Forschungen, No. 51, Strassburg, 1884), Vorrede, p. xxv; the lesson came from Tylor’s book which Müllenhoff had set Mannhardt reading. This letter was written in 1876. See also Müllenhoff’s own definition of mythology in his Deutsche Alterthumskunde, V. 1, 157.
[1103]. Cultur d. Ren. in Ital., I. 288.
[1104]. Zeitschrift f. Gymnasialwesen, Berlin, Nov., 1861, p. 837.
[1105]. Mr. Tylor lets animism of this sort have too free a play among quite primitive men.
[1106]. Too much stress is laid by some writers on primitive studies of death, and of dreams about the dead, as productive of myth. Modern peasants, like savages, often show a heavy and stupid indifference in the presence of death; and its problem, though it doubtless suggested a cult of spirits, was far less insistent with early man than the problem of life. Before he thus worked out a world of dead spirits, he knew by instinctive, really unconscious inference, a world of living spirits, not of his own breed, but vaster, subtler, in those operations of nature which struck into his actual life, interfered with it, or conspicuously helped it.
[1107]. “It hurts me; it makes me cry,” says the child, pointing to the seat of affliction; this “it” corresponds with savage and primitive animism. It is not personification, as one is often told. Human beings do not crawl into other human beings and hurt them; not he or she, but “it” hurts. One remembers the remark of J. Grimm, that the neuter gender means not lack of sex, but the undeveloped, initial stage. Deutsche Grammatik, III. 315.