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NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
of sun and moon and stars, and the vault of heaven; there is all this, and there is much more than all this, wherever we can watch the early growth of religious ideas: but, what we have to learn is, first of all, to distinguish, to study each religion, each mythology, each form of worship by itself, to watch them during successive periods of their growth and decay, to follow them through different strata of society, and before all, to have each of them, as much as possible, studied in their own language.
If language is the realization of thought and feeling, the importance of a knowledge of the language for a correct appreciation of what it was meant to convey in the expression of religious thought" and feeling, requires no proof. I have often insisted on this, and I bave tried to showwhether successfully or not, let others judge--that much of what seems at first irrational and inexplicable in mythology, and in religion also, can be explained by the influence which language exercises on thought. I have never said that the whole of mythology can be explained in that way, that all that seems irrational is due to a misunderstanding, or that all mythology is a disease of language. Some parts of mythology I have proved to be soluble by means of linguistic tests, but mythology as a whole I have always represented as a complete period of thought, inevitable, I believe, in the development of human thought, and comprehending all and everything that at a given time can fall within the horizon of the human mind. The Nemesis of disproportion seems to haunt all new discoveries. Parts of mythology are religious, parts of mythology are historical, parts of mythology are metaphysical, parts of mythology are poetical; but mythology as a whole is neither religion, nor history, nor philosophy, nor poetry. It comprehends all these together under that peculiar form of expression which is natural and intelligible at a certain stage, or at certain recurring stages in the development of thought and speech, but which, after becoming
