is therefore common to all myths—so much so that most inquirers, and especially Max Müller, make the life of the myth to begin only at this stage.
It is the stage of mental development which is signalised by a remarkable fact in the history of language: viz., that an endless multitude of names, bestowed upon the phenomena and processes of nature, in virtue of various features of which there is a preponderating consciousness at the moment of perception, gradually lose their meaning; while some few features of the total phenomenon are retained, to represent all those particular factors and supply comprehensive general terms for their sum total. For example, the Sun has at first a countless number of designations. It is not merely that, in its various aspects, the Sun is treated as the subject of detached observation unrelated in thought to that of other aspects of the same Sun; but the very same aspect, on repeated notice, is regarded as something different every time, and is accordingly denoted by other names. In other words, borrowed from the terminology of modern psychology, no fusion (Verflechtung) has yet been effected. Long-continued observation of the same aspects gives consciousness of their identity under repetition, and makes possible the fusion of their ideas. Next, by a further advance in development, the psychological change emerges, through which the various features of the same phenomenon cease to be essential difference -marks in the idea, and, dropping into the background, give place to a general conception gained by their fusion, an aggregate of fusion (Verflechtungsmasse), the product of often-repeated fusion.[1] The effect on language of this psychological change is that, through its gradual operation, the meaning is lost from the great majority of those expressions which arose merely because the particular observations of the same aspect of a phe-
- ↑ I must refer those readers who are not sufficiently familiar with the terminology to Steinthal's Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin 1871, vol. I., where all this is fully discussed in the section Elementare psychische Processe.
