fore connoting, not only activity, but also life
and personality? We explain it by the theory that man called lifeless
things male or female--by using gender-terminations--as a result of his
habit of regarding lifeless things as personal beings; that habit, again,
being the result of his consciousness of himself as a living will.

Mr. Max Muller takes the opposite view. Man did not call lifeless things
by names denoting sex because he regarded them as persons; he came to
regard them as persons because he had already given them names connoting
sex. And why had he done that? This is what Mr. Max Muller does not
explain. He says:

'In ancient languages every one of these words' (sky, earth, sea, rain)
'had necessarily' (why necessarily?) 'a termination expressive of gender,
and this naturally produced in the mind the corresponding idea of sex, so
that these names received not only an individual but a sexual character.'
{0a}

It is curious that, in proof apparently of this, Mr. Max Muller cites a
passage from the Printer's Register, in which we read that to little
children '_everything_ is _alive_. . . . The same instinct that prompts
the child to personify everything remains unchecked in the savage, and
grows up with him to manhood. Hence in all simple and early languages
there are but two genders, masculine and feminine.'

The Printer's Register states our theory in its own words. First came
the childlike and savage belief in universal personality. Thence arose
the genders, masculine and feminine, in early languages. These ideas are
the precise reverse of Mr. Max Muller's ideas. In his opinion, genders
in language caused the belief in the universal personality even of
inanimate things. The Printer's Register holds that the belief in
universal personality, on the other hand, caused the genders. Yet for
thirty years, since 1868, Mr. Max Muller has been citing his direct
adversary, in the Printer's Register, as a supporter of his opinion! We,
then, hold that man thought all things animated, and expressed his belief
in gender-terminations. Mr. Max Muller holds that, because man used
gender-terminations, therefore he thought all things animated, and so he
became mythopoeic. In the passage cited, Mr. Max Muller does not say
_why_ 'in ancient languages every one of these words had _necessarily_
terminations expressive of gender.' He merely quotes the hypothesis of
the Printer's Register. If he accepts that h