Of savages they have the moral qualities and the intellectual habits. "The prominent characteristics of that early time were the selfishness, the violence, the cruelty and harshness of savages." So much for morality. As for intellect, of the several objects which met his eye, says our author, mythopoeic man had no positive knowledge, whether of their origin, their nature, or their properties. But he had life, and therefore all things else must have life also. This mental stage "Animism," "personalism," or whatever we may call it, is also characteristic of savages. Now when we come in our turn to advance a theory of the origin of Household Tales, many points in these tales will be deduced from the cruelty and from the "Animism" of men like the framers of Sir George Cox's "Primary Myths." But Sir George's evidence for the savage estate of early myth-making man is mainly derived from the study of language.[1] This study has led him to views of the barbarism of the mythmakers with which we are glad to agree, yet he dissents here from his own chief authority, Mr. Max Müller. In the third chapter of the first volume of Mythology of the Aryan Races, the chapter which contains evidence for the intellectual condition of early humanity. Sir George Cox quotes scarcely any testimony except that of Mr. Max Müller.
The most important result of the whole examination, as conducted by Sir George Cox, is that mythopoeic man, knowing nothing of the conditions of his own life or of any other, "invested" all things on the earth or in the
- ↑ When The Mythology of the Aryan Nations was written, philologists were inclined to believe that their analysis of language was the true, perhaps the only key, to knowledge of what men had been in the pre-historic past. It is now generally recognised (though some scholars hold out against the opinion) that the sciences of Anthropology and Archæoloy also throw much light on the human past, which has left no literary documents. Compare Schrader's Sprach- Vergleichung und Urgeschichte. (Jena, 1883.)
