material to the sublimely spiritual. Nor is it necessary that the human mind should always pass through the same stages of development in order to arrive at the same result. The eye of a child may often see what is hidden to the mind of a sage, and the sudden visions of genius do not submit to chronological Yet, if we want to understand the different strata of thought, we have a right to proceed logically rather than chronologically, and from that point of view we have a right to say that the purely dynamic stage comes first, the religious and moral stage come second.

measurement.

Finland.

Having examined Egypt and Babylon, we have now to see how far some of the Ural-altaic languages confirm or invalidate our belief in the necessity of a dynamic stratum of language, and therefore of mythology.

One of the most advanced representatives of Turanianism, whether in language, mythology, religion and literature, is no doubt the Finnish; and here we have the advantage of possessing the trustworthy observations of real scholars, and more particularly of Castrén.

Castrén, in his lectures on Finnish Mythology, gives us a full account of the so-called deities of the air, the water, the earth, and the nether-world. These we shall have to consider hereafter. What interests us in the present stage of our inquiry, and as throwing light on the dynamic period of language and thought, is his account of the Haltias. I shall quote his own words, but I believe that if we could always

substitute the term powers for what he calls haltiæ or deities or spirits, we should enter more fully into the state of mind which gave form and shape to these haltias.

'Every object in nature,' he writes (p. 105), 'must have a tutelary deity, a haltia, a genius. This Haltia was its creator and had to take care of it. These Haltias, however, were not tied to every single finite object, but free, personal beings, moving by themselves, and possessed of form and shape, of body and life. Their existence did not depend on the existence of each single object, for though in nature no object was without its Haltia, their activity was by no means restricted to a single individual, but extended to the whole genus or species. This mountain-ash, this stone, this house, had its own Haltia, but the same Haltias care also for other mountain-ashes, other stones, other houses. The single ash therefore, the single stone, the single house may vanish, and yet their Haltias would continue for ever in the genus.

6

At an earlier period the Fins worshipped natural objects in their visible form. They paid such worship to the forest, for instance, either in its totality or in part, but always under a personal form. read in the Kalevala, Rune 7, v. 282:

Thus we

"Be gracious, O grove; be mild, O wilderness; be moved, O mild Tapio. . . ."

'Samoyedes, Ostjakes, and several more of the nomadic tribes of Siberia have no real concept of any personal divine being ruling over the forest, but wherever they meet on their tunders a small grove of larches or firs, they pay it what we are accustomed to call divine honours, and erect in it their idols. . .

Other tribes ascribe a divine personality to the forest itself, and speak of a mighty forest-god who generally, like the water-god, is represented as a hostile being.'

All these ideas, which are generally disposed of by such names as Animism and Personification, which explain absolutely nothing, become perfectly intelligible, nay, what is far more important, they become perfectly inevitable during that phase of language which I called the Dynamic. If people took any interest in these objects of nature, if they wished to predicate anything at all of them, they could only do it in one way, namely by means of their active

roots.

To say that a tree by being called a feeder became a deity, is mixing up two very remote phases of thought. The ancient people themselves, though they had forgotten the real origin of these active powers, distinguished nevertheless between them and their gods. The Fins, for instance, kept the term Jumala to signify an embodied being, while Haltia was to them more of a spirit-like power. No doubt, it was impossible for them to conceive of spirits without some kind of shape or body (pp. 178, 189, 209), and hence their conceptions of Haltias varied with different poets and different teachers. Some of the Haltias became loved or dreaded, some received worship, others were pacified by offerings. At last, when everything else had received its Haltia, man also was believed to be possessed of a Haltia, and thus the human activity which man had transferred to the objects of nature returned to himself in a modified form.

I shall read you a prayer from the Kalevala, D d

addressed to the Haltias of nature, and then a prayer

addressed to a man's own Haltia (Castrén, p. 171):-'Rise, ye men of the sword,

Heroes of the age of the earth,

Rise from the wells, ye bearers of sickles,
From the rivers, ye shooters with bows!
Come, O Forest, with thy men,

Come, O Thicket, with thy hosts,

Old man of the mountain, with thy forces,
Spirit of the water with thy terrors,
Mother of the waters with thy crowds!
Come ye maidens of all the valleys.
Soft-bordered from all springs,

Come to shield this one man!'

When going on the chase, the hunter would invoke his own Haltia (p. 173):

'Rise my being from the cave,

Rise thou Bright-eye1 from the stones,
Come forth with red cheeks 2,

Thou my spirit from yonder fir-tree!
Put on a shirt of fire!'

Hidatsas in North America.

Having traced the effects of this dynamic stage of language and thought in Egypt, in Babylon, and in Finland, we may glance at one more language which cannot be suspected of consanguinity with any of them, that of the Hidatsa or the Grosventre Indians on the Missouri 3. These Indians, as Mr. Matthews informs us, worship the Great Spirit' or the 'Old Man Immortal,' but they have likewise raised the whole of nature into ever so many powers, or spirits. Whatever is not made by human hands, is conceived as having a power of its own, as being something like man himself. 'Not man alone,' we are told, ‘but the sun, the moon, the stars, all the lower animals, all

An epithet commonly given to the bear.

2 Castrén translates 'with many-coloured cheeks;' the text seems to have with darned cheeks.'

3 M. M., Hibbert Lectures, p. 17.

trees and plants, rivers and lakes, many boulders and other separate rocks, even some hills and buttes which stand alone,' are supposed to possess a spirit, or, as they call it, a shade.

To many philosophers this intellectual phenomenon seems to be perfectly natural and to require no explanation beyond what is supplied by such names as Animism, or Anthropomorphism, or Personification, as if these names could help us in the least. But surely, such names do no more than describe the result, they do not throw a ray of light on the springs which produced the result. The real question is why men should not have been satisfied with taking a tree as a tree or a river as a river. Their eyes gave them no more, their mind required no more. We ourselves require neither Egyptian nutars, nor Babylonian zis, nor Finnish haltias, nor Hidatsa spirits or shades to understand or interpret nature as our senses present it to us. We may call such views of nature poetical, metaphorical, philosophical: but all that does not explain why the ancient nations of the world should have indulged in such metaphors, such poetry, or, if you like, in such philosophy. What we want to know is, what force there was to drive nations of such different characters into one and the same groove? Mr. Matthews seems to me to have come nearest to the truth, when he ascribes this phase of thought to what he calls an individualising tendency, to a wish. to treat each natural object as a subject. But the Science of Language allows us a deeper insight still, and shows us that what we call a tendency of the human mind, was in reality a dire necessity of human speech.