Transcribed from the 1897 Longmans, Green, and Co. edition by DavidPrice, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Dedicated to the memory of John Fergus McLennan.
It may well be doubted whether works of controversy serve any usefulpurpose. ‘On an opponent,’ as Mr. Matthew Arnold said,‘one never does make any impression,’ though one may hopethat controversy sometimes illuminates a topic in the eyes of impartialreaders. The pages which follow cannot but seem wandering anddesultory, for they are a reply to a book, Mr. Max Müller’sContributions to the Science of Mythology,in which the attack is of a skirmishing character. Throughoutmore than eight hundred pages the learned author keeps up an irregularfire at the ideas and methods of the anthropological school of mythologists. The reply must follow the lines of attack.
Criticism cannot dictate to an author how he shall write his ownbook. Yet anthropologists and folk-lorists, ‘agriologists’and ‘Hottentotic’ students, must regret that Mr. Max Müllerdid not state their general theory, as he understands it, fully andonce for all. Adversaries rarely succeed in quite understandingeach other; but had Mr. Max Müller made such a statement, we couldhave cleared up anything in our position which might seem to him obscure.
Our system is but one aspect of the theory of evolution, or is butthe application of that theory to the topic of mythology. Thearchæologist studies human life in its material remains; he tracksprogress (and occasional degeneration) from the rudely chipped flintsin the ancient gravel beds, to the polished stone weapon, and thenceto the ages of bronze and iron. He is guided by material ‘survivals’—ancientarms, implements, and ornaments. The student of Institutions hasa similar method. He finds his relics of the uncivilised pastin agricultural usages, in archaic methods of allotment of land, inodd marriage customs, things rudimentary—fossil relics, as itwere, of an early social and political condition. The archæologistand the student of Institutions compare these relics, material or customary,with the weapons, pottery, implements, or again with the habitual lawand usage of existing savage or barbaric races, and demonstrate thatour weapons and tools, and our laws and manners, have been slowly evolvedout of lower conditions, even out of savage conditions.
The anthropological method in mythology is the same. In civilisedreligion and myth we find rudimentary survivals, fossils of rite andcreed, ideas absolutely incongruous with the environing morality, philosophy,and science of Greece and India. Parallels to these things, soout of keeping with civilisation, we recognise in the creeds and ritesof the lower races, even of cannibals; but there the creeds andrites are not incongruous with their environment of knowledgeand culture. There they are as natural and inevitable as the flint-headedspear or marriage by capture. We argue, therefore, that religionsand mythical faiths and rituals which, among Greeks and Indians, areinexplicably incongruous have lived on from an age in which they werenatural and inevitable, an age of savagery.
That is our general position, and it would have been a benefit tous if Mr. Max Müller had stated it in his own luminous way, ifhe wished to oppose us, and had shown us where and how it fails to meetthe requirements of scientific method. In place of doing thisonce for all, he often assails our evidence, yet never notices the defencesof our evidence, which our school has been offering for over a hundredyears. He attacks the excesses of which some sweet anthropologicalenthusiasts have been guilty or may be guilty, such as seeing totemswhe