It is not that the early Aryans
were myth-makers because their language abounded in metaphor;
it is that the Aryan mother-tongue abounded in metaphor
because the men and women who spoke it were myth-makers. And
they were myth-makers because they had nothing but the
phenomena of human will and effort with which to compare
objective phenomena. Therefore it was that they spoke of the
sun as an unwearied voyager or a matchless archer, and
classified inanimate no less than animate objects as masculine
and feminine. Max Muller's way of stating his theory, both in
this Essay and in his later Lectures, affords one among
several instances of the curious manner in which he combines a
marvellous penetration into the significance of details with a
certain looseness of general conception.[155] The principles
of philological interpretation are an indispensable aid to us
in detecting the hidden meaning of many a legend in which the
powers of nature are represented in the guise of living and
thinking persons; but before we can get at the secret of the
myth-making tendency itself, we must leave philology and enter
upon a psychological study. We must inquire into the
characteristics of that primitive style of thinking to which
it seemed quite natural that the sun should be an unerring
archer, and the thunder-cloud a black demon or gigantic robber
finding his richly merited doom at the hands of the indignant
Lord of Light.
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