This process can be traced upwards from animals of low organisation to man, and within the human race can be confirmed through its various stages of development, geographical and historical. At the myth-creating stage, intellectual uniformity prevails almost universally, in all individuals. Consequently here only the sum total of the men who are creating language and myth has any power; the individual could not effect anything of his own, different from the work of others. There is no such thing as either language or myth of a single individual;[1] and what Steinthal says in reference to national songs, is equally true of both of them, that the mind which produces them, 'is the mind of a multitude of persons without individuality, held together by physical and mental relationship; and whatever is mentally produced by this multitude is a creation of the common mind, i.e. of the nation.'[2] And just for this reason the common mind in each of the various epochs of civilisation has its own characteristic impress, a tendency and fundamental conception, which distinguish it from those of the preceding epoch.
Among the Nomads, then, the dark, cloudy heaven of night is the sympathetic mythical figure; they imagine it conquering, or if it is overcome, give to its fall a tragic character, so that it falls lamented and worthy rather of victory than of ruin; and the Nomad's grief for the defeated power is propagated from age to age far beyond the mythical period. The sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter is still lamented from time to time by the daughters of Israel. It is just the reverse with the myth of the Agriculturist. He makes the brilliant heaven of day-time conquer, and the gloomy cloudy heaven or the dark night
- ↑ On the disappearance of individuality in direct proportion to antiquity, see Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues, Berlin 1836. p. 4. Lazarus appears to concede to the individual too much influence on the origin of speech; see Leben der Seele, II. 115.
- ↑ See the article 'Das Epos' in Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie, &c. 1868, V. 8, 10.
