ceed from a view of the universe and the phenomena which exist in it, or from the study of mankind and its history. The former constitutes the objective basis, that is, the physical element; the latter, the personal or psychical element. The spirit of mythology starts with the assumption that the two are identical, or that there is an internal connexion between them. It also implies, not merely that the phenomena of the external world are mastered by language generally, but also that an organic language has been formed out of a language of word-stems. The formation of nouns, with grammatical differences of gender, is the Mythology of Things. Things, indeed, are no more masculine and feminine than is the Deity. In like manner, the actions which are ascribed to things, as if they were persons, are nothing more than a travesty of primitive mythology. This poetry of language is antecedent to Mythology Proper, and, in truth, goes step by step with it. Contemporary with inorganic language is the contemplative, but not personifying, view of the universe in its unity. In that age, the so-called Heaven is the symbol of the eternal thought of creation. Mythology, in the strict sense, implies organic languages with parts of speech; the mythological genealogies of the gods are a continuation of the genealogy and personification of things.

This analogy is based upon the essence of language and religion. As language is the religion of things, so is religion the language of God to man. Mythology, with its histories of the gods and fictitious personalities, is the poetry of the progress of religion in the world; as the distinction of genders in the noun, and of moods and tenses in the verb, is in organic languages the utterance of the mythology of the apperception of separate things.

The ideas of mythological religion are not represented as thoughts, but as beings in which certain original powers are inherent, physical as well as spiritual; for

viewed in this light they are inseparable. The mythological view is the original epos not yet separated off, and the original drama of mankind. Something which exists to eternity, but not yet manifested in time, must be employed to represent that which lives in the human soul. A history is narrated which terminates in reality, and this reality is the universe, and man who finds himself placed in it.

Thus the first song of this epos describes creation, the beginnings of the world and of mankind. Now, if the contemplative mind at this stage of consciousness rises to these beginnings, it becomes an essential requirement, an internal necessity, which is directly connected with the artificial tendency to representation inherent in it, so that it conceives and represents as personal beings the forces and matter, or matter and forces, which are assumed to be dominant. The matter is animated by force, the force incorporated in matter; like soul and body, they are internally united with a personality; or they are broken up into a contrast, like beings (wife, sister, brother) allied by marriage or consanguinity with each other; or the one is considered to be derived from the other, and they are consequently viewed as father and son: for instance, air and wind, ether and fire, heaven and earth, land and sea, mountain and plain, each of which is represented as a personal being. In like manner, also, time and space, in which they move, may be conceived as the personal power of a conscious will; in fact, all the spiritual forces and properties which are transferred from the human soul into the Divinity. Or it may be better expressed thus: The forces which are recognised or felt to be divine and eternal are represented as individual beings. Here, then, in the first place, the love and attachment of beings are exhibited, sympathy and kindness of disposition: in like manner their opposites; hatred and antipathy, hostility and ill-will. Nothing is ascribed to these dominant beings but power

and strength without distinction, either unqualified, or restricted within certain limits. It is the fundamental law of mythology, that each power is a being, each being a power.

C.

THE DIFFERENT THEOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTIONS OF MYTHOLOGY.

DURING the infancy of philosophy and history, all the above phenomena are either estimated from a religious point of view, as being the true or erroneous representation and doctrine of divine things, or else from a sceptical point of view, which is either rationalistic or material.

Viewed in a material sense, all conceptions of the Infinite are merely a misunderstanding of the Finite; the Soul itself, when regarded logically, is merely the unity of the impulses of the external world through its sensational qualities. The rationalistic view sees nothing in mythology but the apotheosis and poetical idea of nature and human history. The latter must unquestionably be considered the most shallow and simple. According to it, not only mythology, but religion itself, must be a misunderstanding. Under this system, however, divine worship is implied in all these images and symbols, although the original of their representation is repudiated.

Sound philosophy, as well as profound research, has long since taught us that all these formations and personifications would be as impossible as those of language, if the idea of causality were not inherent in the human mind, and indeed that of the highest unconditional cause, the creative conscious spirit. All Polytheism is based on Monotheism; idolatry implies religious feeling. The root of idolatry is unbelief in spirit as well as

goodness. The origin of this unbelief, however, is selfishness; its aim being to draw divine things into itself, or to set itself up above them. For this same selfishness induces man, when contemplating the world and the soul, to separate power from goodness, truth and justice from reason and conscience. Idolatry is based upon the deification of self. A true Monotheism is so far from being based upon an unconditional separation of God and the world, that it would be rather correct to say that it consists in the inseparable union of the two. But it is also connected with a twofold faith: faith in the unity of truth and goodness, or, to use the language of Kant, of theoretical and practical reason, and faith in mankind, i. e. in the overpowering attractive force of the Deity as the highest and eternal good, and in the free agency of man, by which that good necessarily is realised in time.

And here we touch upon the dangerous phase of Polytheism. Religion (in the general sense) is distinguished from morality, because God is considered as separate from goodness, reason from conscience.

The only divine quality in Holy Scripture, in the Law, the Prophets, and the Gospel, consists rather in the fact of its confirming that unity, than in its teaching it, or, rather, starting from it. The internal conception of that unity is limited and veiled in the Old Testament, because its object was the spiritual education of the Jewish people, and through them of mankind; to extricate them from the power of nature over conscience. The Old Testament represents the moral law as the highest law, without, however, representing love as the unity of the whole law. The realisation of the moral law in the Old Testament is burdened with the curse of externality, through the predominance of ritualistic forms and ordinances. The limitation and negation are only removed, and the curse expiated, by Christianity, that is, through the life and the teaching of Jesus.

Mythology, therefore, or the primitive epos and primitive drama of mankind about divine things and the origines of human events, is a poem constructed out of primitive ideas, out of reminiscences of the earliest world and individual experiences.

As religious consciousness is not a thing acquired, but self-producing, so the above formation follows as the necessary corollary from a primitive impulse, which may be kept down or obscured and subdued, but not destroyed.

The case is the same in Theogony. It is based in part on the unconscious thought of the creative Deity, in part on the individual formations of gods, on worship, and the celebration of them in myths. Before proceeding farther, it will be better to glance at the actual state of the facts.

D.

THE FACT OF THE ASIATIC ORIGIN OF THE EGYPTIAN AS WELL AS THE HELLENIC LANGUAGE, AND OF THE GERMS OF MYTHOLOGY.

THE result of philology is that the Hellenic race and other Arian peoples held in common the fundamental idea of the Divinity as ether and creator, though it contained likewise some Phoenician elements. But, as regards Egypt, it also proves, when compared with older religious records and monuments, that Semitic roots are found in the names of Egyptian gods, but not the converse, namely, Egyptian roots in the names of Semitic gods. This fact we think we can now carry considerably farther. We hope to be able to show that the Semites invented Theogony for the other peoples, especially for the Hellenes; and that the Egyptians retained, together with the Theogony, the mythology which preceded it, essentially