[1108]. Posnett, Comparative Literature, pp. 162 ff. The idea, however, is by no means as new as Posnett thinks it to be.
[1110]. Vignoli, in his Myth and Science, notes that a dog growls or bites at a stick thrust toward him, a kind of animism; although as Spencer said,—with quite unwarrantable inference in the denial of nature-myths among primitive men,—a dog takes no notice of ordinary natural doings, swaying boughs, sunrise, and all the rest.
[1111]. Max Müller’s “disease of language” as source of myth is absurd; the myth does not wait for the misunderstanding of a metaphor, but begins with the metaphor and lives with its life,—both being, of course, unconscious at the start.
[1112]. A child who saw a flash of lightning once said, “God is winking at me”; and the phrase was seized upon as a fine illustration of primitive myth-making. But the child had been presented, by the whole process of human culture and thought, with at least two-thirds of this “myth,”—the idea of God, of a distinct, supreme personality, and the reference to God of whatever goes on in the sky.
[1113]. See E. H. Meyer, Indogerm. Mythen, Berlin, 1883, I. 87.
[1114]. In the reaction from ideas of a golden age one must not go too far, and “call names” which now mean vice, degeneration, rottenness. It is possible that even earliest myth touched here and there a chord of poetry as we now know poetry, and appealed to that constant element which belongs to our humanity and not to our history.
[1115]. Or, of course, a tradition; so Prometheus and the origin of fire may account for the stealing of fire from some neighbouring tribe. See Gruppe, Griechische Culte and Mythen, p. 206.
[1117]. Comparetti, Kalewala, pp. 154 f., in his excellent remarks on popular myth and popular poetry, has left his analysis incomplete by leaving throng-poetry quite out of the account.