Présentation de l'éditeur :
For thirty years past Professor Max Miiller has been teaching in his books and lectures, in the Times, Saturday Revieiv, and various magazines, from the platform of the Royal I nstitution, the pulpit of Westminster A bbey, and his chair at Oxford, that Mythology is a disease of language, and that the ancient symbolism was a result of something like a primitive mental aberration. We know, says Renouf, echoing Max Miiller, in hisH ibbert lectures, We know that mythology is the disease which springs up at a peculiar stage of human culture. Such is the shallow explanation of the non-evolutionists, and such explanations are still accepted by theB ritish public, that gets its thinking done for it by proxy. Professor Max Miiller, Cox, Gubernatis and other propounders of theS olar Mythos have portrayed the primitive myth-maker for us as a sort of Germanised-H indu metaphysician, projecting his own shadow on a mental mist, and talking ingeniously concerning smoke, or, at least, cloud ;the sky overhead becoming like the dome of dreamland, scribbled over with the imagery of aboriginal nightmares! They conceive the early man in their own likeness, and look upon him as perversely prone to self-mystification, or, as Fontenelle has it, subject to beholding things that are not there! They have misrepresented primitive or archaic man as having been idiotically misled from the first by an active but untutored imagination into believing all sorts of fallacies, which were directly and constantly contradicted by his own daily experience; a fool of fancy in the midst of those grim realities that were grinding his experience into him, like the griding icebergs making their imprints upon the rocks submerged beneath the sea. It remains to be said, and will one day be acknowledged, that these accepted teachers have been no nearer to the beginnings of mythology and language than Burns
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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