46 Proceedings of the Pioyal Society 
and the sovereign sway of intellect. For I do not believe in any 
period when man was merely a brute, or a nondescript creature, 
half emergent from the primeval man-monkey or monkey-man. 
Individual tribes of a low type, such as those whom my ingenious, 
acute, and learned friend, Mr M‘Lennan, calls by the undignified 
name of Totems , may always have existed ; but in a general Totem - 
state of an embryo and embruted humanity I do not believe. 
Hypotheses of this kind are the conceit of speculative scicence, 
not historical fact. Starting from this base of operations, our first 
business is to look our gods fairly in the face, and by a reverential 
and poetic study of their forms, attitude, dress, badges, and symbols, 
to recreate the anthropomorphised power in its original elemental 
significance. And this must be done in an extremely cautious and 
careful way, so as to make legitimate our inductive conclusions, 
after the method of which such admirable examples are given by 
Ottfried Muller in his “Prolegomena” — a small book in respect 
of bulk, but a truly great book in respect of significance ; and to 
the principles laid down in which it would be well if some of our 
recent mythological speculators would seriously recur. Mr Ruskin’s 
method of interpreting tbe G-reek gods without such a careful 
scholarly preparation, is mere brilliant trifling ; and all excursions 
into the realms of comparative mythology and philology, after the 
fashion of Creuzer and Bryant, without first taking sober counsel 
from home materials, can result only in floating conjecture, not in 
stable knowledge. Now, to give an example of what I mean : if 
we take three of the principal gods of the Hellenic Olympus — 
Zeus, Poseidon, and Apollo — and peruse them carefully, I defy any 
man who has a common amount of classical reading, and who, like 
Wordsworth, can put himself into the position of the original 
creators of mythology, to form any other conclusion than that these 
personages are mere anthropomorphic disguises of the heavens, the 
ocean, and the sun ; and towards forming this conclusion, with a 
man who is entitled to have a judgment on such subjects, not a 
single shred of Hebrew or Sanscrit, or any foreign organon of 
interpretation, is required. It may be interesting to know that 
Zevs in its Sanscrit form means bright or shining; but it is not 
necessary towards a well-grounded scientific induction of the ori- 
ginal significance of the god. 
