Mr. Max Muller’s whole system of mythology is based on reasoning analogous to this example.  His mot d’ordre, as Professor Tiele says, is ‘a disease of language.’  This theory implies universal human degradation.  Man was once, for all we know, rational enough; but his mysterious habit of using gender-terminations, and his perpetual misconceptions of the meaning of old words in his own language, reduced him to the irrational and often (as we now say) obscene and revolting absurdities of his myths.  Here (as is later pointed out) the objection arises, that all languages must have taken the disease in the same way.  A Maori myth is very like a Greek myth.  If the Greek myth arose from a disease of Greek, how did the wholly different Maori speech, and a score of others, come to have precisely the same malady?

Mr. Max Muller alludes to a Maori parallel to the myth of Cronos. {0b} ’We can only say that there is a rusty lock in New Zealand, and a rusty lock in Greece, and that, surely, is very small comfort.’  He does not take the point.  The point is that, as the myth occurs in two remote and absolutely unconnected languages, a theory of disease of language cannot turn the wards of the rusty locks.  The myth is, in part at least, a nature-myth—­an attempt to account for the severance of Heaven and Earth (once united) by telling a story in which natural phenomena are animated and personal.  A disease of language has nothing to do with this myth.  It is cited as a proof against the theory of disease of language.

The truth is, that while languages differ, men (and above all early men) have the same kind of thoughts, desires, fancies, habits, institutions.  It is not that in which all races formally differ—­their language—­but that in which all early races are astonishingly the same—­their ideas, fancies, habits, desires—­that causes the amazing similarity of their myths.

Mythologists, then, who find in early human nature the living ideas which express themselves in myths will hardily venture to compare the analogous myths of all peoples.  Mythologists, on the other hand, who find the origin of myths in a necessity imposed upon thought by misunderstood language will necessarily, and logically, compare only myths current among races who speak languages of the same family.  Thus, throughout Mr. Max Muller’s new book we constantly find him protesting, on the whole and as a rule, against the system which illustrates Aryan myths by savage parallels.  Thus he maintains that it is perilous to make comparative use of myths current in languages—­say, Maori or Samoyed—­which the mythologists confessedly do not know.  To this we can only reply that we use the works of the best accessible authorities, men who do know the languages—­say, Dr. Codrington or Bishop Callaway, or Castren or Egede.  Now it is not maintained that the myths, on the whole, are incorrectly translated.  The danger which we incur, it seems, is ignorance of the original sense