and more particularly a psychological interest, and though even in this more general study of mankind the frontiers of language and race ought never to disappear, yet they can no longer be allowed to narrow or intercept our view.'[1] Thus Müller also lays especial stress upon the psychological point of view, and, whatever he concedes to race-distinctions, still takes for granted the universality of the formation of myths as a psychological postulate. He exhibits, however, the application of his principle to the Turanian only in concrete examples. The Semitic, which, as we saw above, cannot be excluded in reference to the universality of the formation of myths, is left out altogether. Yet Müller appears in respect of the Semitic to have passed beyond the position on which he stood in 1860, when writing his essay 'Semitic Monotheism.'[2] Advancing in the footsteps of the master, a recent American mythologist, John Fiske, has drawn the Turanian into the domain of comparative mythology, and worked out a portion of the American stories collected by Brinton,[3] according to the laws of the new method,[4] while the German Schirren, and also Gerland less completely, had already subjected the Polynesian myths to a similar treatment.[5]
This circumstance, that the stories of the so-called Turanian humanity lend themselves to the comparative method of investigation quite as easily as the legendary treasure of the Aryan nations, is a proof how common to all mankind is the mythological capacity, how false it is to follow ethnological categories and assign it to one race and deny it to another; and on the other hand, how the
- ↑ Introduction to the Science of Religion, p. 390 et seq.
- ↑ In Chips, &c., I. p. 341.
- ↑ In The Myths of the New World, New York 1868. See Steinthal's criticism of this collection in the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 1871, Bd. VII.
- ↑ Myths and Myth-Makers, Boston 1873, p. 151 et seq.
- ↑ In the sixth vol. of Waitz's Anthropologie der Naturvölker, where I obtained information about Schirren's works.
