view. The exclusion of the Semites from the domain of Mythology is announced most emphatically by the ingenious member of the French Academy, Ernest Renan, in the words, 'Les Sémites n'ont jamais eu de mythologie.'[1] This arbitrary assertion is deduced from a scheme of race-psychology invented by Renan himself, which at the first glance seems so natural and sounds so plausible when described with all the elegance of style of which he is master, that it has become an incontestable scientific dogma to a large proportion of the professional world for even the territory of science is sometimes dominated by mere dogmas and is treated by learned and cultivated people not specially engaged in this study as an actual axiom in the consideration of race-peculiarities.[2] The foundation of this scheme is the idea that in their views of the world, the Aryans start from multiplicity, the Semites from, unity; and not only in their conception of the world, but also in politics and art. On intellectual ground, therefore, the former create mythology, polytheism, science, which is only possible through discursive observation of natural phenomena; the latter create monotheism, ('the desert is monotheistic,' says Renan), and have there-
- ↑ Histoire générale et Système comparé des Langues sémitiques, p. 7.
- ↑ Two instances will suffice to show how Renan's hypothesis became the common property of educated people. It is treated as fully made out, both by Roscher, the German political economist, and by Draper, the American naturalist and historian of civilisation. The former says: 'Life in the desert seems to be an especially favourable soil for Monotheism. It wants that luxuriant variety of the productive powers of nature by which Polytheism was encouraged in remarkably fruitful countries, such as India' (System der Volkswirthschaft, 7th ed., Stuttgart 1873, II. 38). The latter: 'Polytheistic ideas have always been held in repute by the southern European races; the Semitic have maintained the unity of God. Perhaps this is due to the fact, as a recent author has suggested, that a diversified landscape of mountains and valleys, islands, rivers, and gulfs, predisposes man to a belief in a multitude of divinities. A vast sandy desert, the illimitable ocean, impresses him with an idea of the oneness of God (History of Conflict between Religion and Science, London 1875, p. 70). This view has also passed into Peschel's Völkerkunde, and Bluntschli also, in his lecture on the ancient oriental ideas of God and world in 1861, echoed Renan's hypothesis of 1855.
