bring all the myths under a single process of formation is to pretend to open all doors with the same key. There is no pass-key in mythology.
We have still stronger reasons for being on our guard against seeing myths in everything. Our century has witnessed numerous attempts to reduce, not only the great religious initiators, Moses, Jesus, and Buddha, to myths, but all the persons who have played a considerable part in the traditions of history, from Lycurgus to Charlemagne. A sportive essay has even been made to show that Napoleon I was a solar hero, and sustained by arguments the force of which is hardly exceeded by their wit,[1]
Even the knowledge that some students have of a particular religion may become a cause of errors. Every one has not the sure glance and the fullness of information that have permitted Max Müller to study the origin of religions "in the light of the religions of India." Read the captivating work on "The Science of Religions," by a writer to whom the Sanskrit antiquities were a kind of family heritage, M. Émile Burnouf. The author sets out to show that "the center from which have radiated all the great religions of the earth, is the theory of Agni, of which Jesus Christ is the most complete incarnation."[2] This theory, as it is laid down in the Vedas, is nothing else than the scientific doctrine of the identity of the principle of fire and motion, of life and thought. How does the author fill the gap between the Vedic ages and that of the composition of the gospel of St. John? He supposes that this theory, formulated previously to the dispersion of the Indo-Iranians, was transmitted by the Persians to the Jews in captivity at Babylon, and that Jesus, having received it from the latest prophets, communicated it to his disciples, to be divulged only after the formation of the Church. Is it necessary to stop to show that this is simply a hierographic romance?
To still another category of preconceived ideas, calculated to falsify the results of religious criticism, belong the preferences arising from the isolated study of a single science. Such preferences give rise to a natural predilection for the field of investigations we have chosen, and to a tendency to refer to it all the problems we are called upon to resolve. Now, when a student applies the processes of one science to another, he runs a strong risk of erring on the one side by approaching facts with an insufficient method, and on the other by perceiving only the phase corresponding to his order of habitual preoccupations. I will draw my example from the two sciences which have perhaps rendered the most service to the history of religions—linguistics and anthropology.
