Chapter 2 - Page 2

Greeks or Romans brought to perfection, or retained, little altered from their early rudeness, in the midst of civilisation.

It is inevitable that this science should also try its hand on mythology. Our purpose is to employ the anthropological method-- the study of the evolution of ideas, from the savage to the barbarous, and thence to the civilised stage--in the province of myth, ritual, and religion. It has been shown that the light of this method had dawned on Eusebius in his polemic with the heathen apologists. Spencer, the head of Corpus, Cambridge (1630-93), had really no other scheme in his mind in his erudite work on Hebrew Ritual.[1] Spencer was a student of man's religions generally, and he came to the conclusion that Hebrew ritual was but an expurgated, and, so to speak, divinely "licensed" adaptation of heathen customs at large. We do but follow his guidance on less perilous ground when we seek for the original forms of classical rite and myth in the parallel usages and legends of the most backward races.

[1] De Legibus Hebraeorum Ritualibus, Tubingae, 1782.

Fontenelle in the last century, stated, with all the clearness of the French intellect, the system which is partially worked out in this essay--the system which explains the irrational element in myth as inherited from savagery. Fontenelle's paper (Sur l'Origine des Fables) is brief, sensible, and witty, and requires little but copious evidence to make it adequate. But he merely threw out the idea, and left it to be neglected.[1]

[1] See Appendix A., Fontenelle's Origine des Fables.

Among other founders of the anthropological or historical school of mythology, De Brosses should not be forgotten. In his Dieux Fetiches (1760) he follows the path which Eusebius indicated--the path of Spencer and Fontenelle--now the beaten road of Tylor and M'Lennan and Mannhardt.

In anthropology, in the science of Waitz, Tylor, and M'Lennan, in the examination of man's faith in the light of his social, legal, and historical conditions generally, we find, with Mannhardt, some of the keys of myth. This science "makes it manifest that the different stages through which humanity has passed in its intellectual evolution have still their living representatives among various existing races. The study of these lower races is an invaluable instrument for the interpretation of the survivals from earlier stages, which we meet in the full civilisation of cultivated peoples, but whose origins were in the remotest fetichism and savagery."[1]

[1] Mannhardt op. cit. p. xxiii.

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It is by following this road, and by the aid of anthropology and of human history, that we propose to seek for a demonstrably actual condition of the human intellect, whereof the puzzling qualities of myth would be the natural and inevitable fruit. In all the earlier theories which we have sketched, inquirers