Читать книгу Outlines of Universal History, Designed as a Text-book and for Private Reading - George Park Fisher - Страница 16

That mythology is the product of a mere exaggeration of actual events, or is an allegorical picture, either of the operations of nature or of human traits, is an untenable and obsolete view.

We shall not err in defining the main sources of the religions to be, first, the sense of dependence, and the yearning for the fellowship and favor of powers "not ourselves," by which the lot of men is felt to be determined; secondly, the effort to explain the world of nature above and beneath, and the occurrences of life; and thirdly, the personifying instinct which belongs to the childhood of nations as of individuals. This tendency leads to the attributing of conscious life to things inanimate. A like tendency may impel the savage and the child to ascribe mind to the lower animals. The fact that language, in its earlier stage, was charged with personal life and activity, is itself the work of the personifying instinct. When nature is thus personified, where there is no sense of its unity and no capacity to rise in faith to a living God above nature, the result is a multitude of divinities of higher and lower rank. Myths respecting them are the spontaneous invention of unreflecting and uncritical, but imaginative, peoples. Thus they serve to indicate the range of ideas, and the moral spirit of those who originate and give credence to them.

This is not the place to consider the question, What was the primitive religion of man? The earliest deities that history brings to our notice were not fetiches, but heavenly beings of lofty attributes. Whether the religions of savage tribes, in common with their low grade of intelligence, are, or are not, the result of degeneracy, is a question which secular history affords no means of deciding with confidence,

It may be added, that, in historic eras, the mythopoeic fancy is not inactive. Stories of marvelous adventure clustered about the old Celtic King Arthur of England and the "knights of the Round-Table," and fill up the chronicles relating to Charlemagne. Wherever there is a person who kindles popular enthusiasm, myths accumulate. This is eminently true in an atmosphere like that which prevailed in the mediaeval period, when imagination and emotion were dominant.