f Achilles when he begins, like the horse
in Grimm's Goose Girl, to hold a sustained conversation.(1) But the
ancient, cruel, and grotesque savage element, nearly overcome by Homer
and greatly reduced by the Vedic poets, breaks out again in Hesiod, in
temple legends and Brahmanic glosses, and finally proves so strong that
it can only be subdued by Christianity, or rather by that break between
the educated classes and the traditional past of religion which has
resulted from Christianity. Even so, myth lingers in the folk-lore of
the non-progressive classes of Europe, and, as in Roumania, invades
religion.

(1) Iliad, xix. 418.

We have now to demonstrate the existence in the savage intellect of
the various ideas and habits which we have described, and out of which
mythology springs. First, we have to show that "a nebulous and confused
state of mind, to which all things, animate or inanimate, human, animal,
vegetable or inorganic, seem on the same level of life, passion and
reason," does really exist.(1) The existence of this condition of the
intellect will be demonstrated first on the evidence of the statements
of civilised observers, next on the evidence of the savage institutions
in which it is embodied.

(1) Creuzer and Guigniaut, vol. i. p. 111.

The opinion of Mr. Tylor is naturally of great value, as it is formed
on as wide an acquaintance with the views of the lower races as any
inquirers can hope to possess. Mr. Tylor observes: "We have to inform
ourselves of the savage man's idea, which is very different from the
civilised man's, of the nature of the lower animals.... The sense of an
absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in
the civilised world, is hardly to be found among the lower races."(1)
The universal attribution of "souls" to all things--the theory known as
"Animism"--is another proof that the savage draws no hard and fast line
between man and the other things in the world. The notion of the Italian
country-people, that cruelty to an animal does not matter because it is
not a "Christian," has no parallel in the philosophy of the savage,
to whom all objects seem to have souls, just as men have. Mr. Im Thurn
found the absence of any sense of a difference between man and nature
a characteristic of his native companions in Guiana. "The very phrase,
'Men and other animals,' or even, as it is often expressed, 'Men and
animals,' based as it is on the superiority which civi