It is an easy method of dealing with folk-lore.
If you take the rhyme of Mary and her little lamb, and call Mary the sun
and the lamb the moon, you will achieve astonishing results, both in
religion and astronomy, when you find that the lamb followed Mary to
school one day. This nature element, however, had undoubtedly a very
considerable part in the origin of myths, and when Max Mueller combines
it with philology it opens a vast field of extraordinarily interesting
interpretations resting upon words and their changes.
A further theory of myths is that which regards them as the stories of
races told as if they had been the lives of individuals. This, as is
well known, has had permanent effects upon the interpretation not only
of Greek but of Hebrew ancient writings, and it throws light upon some
of those chapters of Genesis which, without it, are but strings of
forgotten and unpronounceable names.
But beyond all such explanations, after we have allowed for them in
every possible way, there remains a conviction that behind these
fascinating stories there is a certain irreducible remainder of actual
fact.
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