Myth and Science / An Essay

by Tito Vignoli

When this evolution takes place in peoples and races which are incapable of improvement, or have a limited capacity for advanced civilization, the faculty of myth remains in the ascendant; and as past and present history shows, mythical stagnation and intellectual barrenness may follow, until intellectual development is arrested and even destroyed. If on the other hand the evolution takes place in peoples and races capable of indefinite civilization, myth gradually disappears and science shines forth victoriously.

Even in historical and civilized races the two cycles go on together, since while robust intellects throw off as they advance the mythical shell in which they were first inclosed, the ignorant masses continue their devotions to fetishes and myths, which they can infuse even into the grandest religious teaching. They perhaps might also perish, crystallized in their miserable superstitions, unless, in virtue of the race to which they belong, the nobler minds were gradually to succeed in illuminating and raising them into a purer atmosphere. In our Aryan race, and in our own country we have all seen the ideas of Christianity transformed into the earlier fetishes and pagan myths; the saints are merely substituted for the gods and demi-gods, for the deities of groves, of the sea and of war, as they are found in ancient mythology. The legends of the saints and of Christ himself are grafted on similar legends of the ancient religions of Greece and Rome, and Paradise has assumed the appearance and form of Olympus. The paintings still extant in the catacombs of Rome, which mark the transformation of the old into the new religion, speak plainly enough by their symbols and figures.

Myth is logically identical with the scientific process in its intrinsic character; starting from a vague subjectivity which gradually assumes a human shape, the first intellectual vitality is lost, unless it is revived by a higher impulse. Science, on the other hand, which begins in myth, gradually divests this subjectivity of its anthropomorphic character, until pure reason is attained, and with this the power of indefinite progress.

The theory which has hitherto been generally accepted by mythologists, even by those who profess Comte's great principle of historical evolution, is that man began with special fetishes, that these were combined in comprehensive types to form polytheistic hierarchies, and hence he rose by an analogous process to a more or less vague conception of monotheism.

This theory, true as to the principal forms which myth successively assumes, is not accurate with respect to the stages of development, and it is also erroneous in some particulars of the actual history of the various mythologies of different peoples.

In the early chapters of this work we have briefly touched on such a development, and the reader must pardon us for returning to the subject, now that we have to give an historical account of the process of evolution. In fact, the fetish, in the general sense of the term, is not the first form of myth which is revealed in the dawn of human life. In order to estimate its positive value, it is necessary to analyze such a conception with greater accuracy, and then to verify it historically with the help of the science of ethnology.

The first manifestations of mythical ideas must be considered in man as an animal; that is, as the result of his spontaneous intercourse with the world, independently of the psychical faculty peculiar to himself, after he had acquired by subsequent evolution of mind and body the faculty and habit of reflection. This first stage does not involve any definite fetish, that is, an immediate belief in a special object which exerts its influence on the human soul, even when it is remote and unseen: such a fetish is a secondary stage in human development. The first mythical representations of animals, and of man, so far as his animal nature is concerned, are not confined to fixed objects, which can be retained in the mind as operative under all circumstances; they are indefinite, and diffused through all the phenomena which are successively perceived and vivified. The unseen wind which rises and falls, the moving cloud, the flash of lightning and roar of thunder, the dawn, the rushing torrent—when any of these things are perceived by animals and primitive men, they are endowed with subjective life and are supposed to act with deliberate purpose; and this is the first form of myth. But when they are not present (I here speak of the animal nature of man) they do not remain in the mind as persistent beings to which the tribute of worship inspired by hope or fear must be paid; these and other phenomena only inspire such sentiments when they are actually present.

It is no vain distinction which I mate between the first vague and intermittent form of myth suggested by phenomena actually present, and that of the first stage of fetish: this distinction marks the difference between the mythical representation of animals and the classifying and reflective process peculiar to man.

Comte was the first to remark, quite incidentally, that animals might sometimes attain to the idea of a fetish; Darwin gave the instance of a dog which was scared by the movement of an open umbrella in a meadow, although he remained quiet when it was unshaken by the wind; and Herbert Spencer, partly accepting these ideas, adduces two somewhat similar instances of the behaviour of dogs. It seems to us that these great men are mistaken on the one hand in assuming that the first essential origin of myth is not to be found in the animal kingdom, and on the other in supposing that these facts have only an accidental value, and that animals only occasionally acquire a vague consciousness of the fetish.

Those readers who have gone with us so far will perceive that these were not mere accidents of rare occurrence in animal life, but that they are the necessary effect of mythical representation in its first stage, although they cannot in any way be supposed to be produced by fetishism, properly so called. For if the dog were frightened and agitated by the movement of the umbrella, or ran away, as Herbert Spencer tells us, from the stick which had hurt him while he was playing with it, it was because an unusual movement or pain produced by an object to which habit had rendered him indifferent, aroused in the animal the congenital sense of the intentional subjectivity of phenomena, and this is really the first stage of myth, and not of its subsequent form of fetishism.