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Updated: May 5, 2025
The young man who "investigated" the ghost rang the bell thrice violently, and then fell down dead, nor could he in any wise satisfy the curiosity of his friends. That fable is exploded. It was what is called an "aetiological myth;" by the learned it was merely a story devised to account for the fact that the house was not occupied.
The pre-Socratic natural philosophers, on the basis of the maxim as old as philosophy itself Ἀδύνατον γίνεσθαι τι ἐκ μηδενὸς προυπάρχοντος pointed to an Ἀρχή a real behind phenomena, a permanent behind the change and thus pointed to the so-called Aetiological argument founded on the principle of causality.
Langloh Parker wrote this book, we had but few of the stories which Australian natives tell by the camp-fire or in the gum-tree shade. These, for the most part, are KINDER MARCHEN, though they include many aetiological myths, explanatory of the markings and habits of animals, the origin of constellations, and so forth.
But I do care for what Ben Jonson and Shakespeare's fellow-actors said; and for what his literary contemporaries have left on record. But this evidence you explain away by aetiological guesses, absolutely modern, and, I conceive, to anyone familiar with historical inquiry, not more valuable as history than other explanatory myths.
It is in this sense that myths are aetiological. The imagination which produces them is, in a sense, a 'scientific imagination. It works within limits.
Having regard to this general scheme of geological knowledge and thought, it is obvious that geological speculation may be, so to speak, anatomical and developmental speculation, so far as it relates to points of stratigraphical arrangement which are out of reach of direct observation; or, it may be physiological speculation so far as it relates to undetermined problems relative to the activities of the earth; or, it may be distributional speculation, if it deals with modifications of the earth's place in space; or, finally, it will be aetiological speculation if it attempts to deduce the history of the world, as a whole, from the known properties of the matter of the earth, in the conditions in which the earth has been placed.
It is an induction, as wide as the world being based on mythologies from all parts of the world that myths are aetiological, that their purpose is to give the reason of things, to explain the origin of fire, agriculture, civilisation, the world of anything, in fact, that to the savage seems to require explanation.
The Tuna story belongs to a very well known class of aetiological plant-stories, which are meant to explain a no longer intelligible name of a plant, such as Snakeshead, Stiefmutterchen, &c.; it is in fact a clear case of what I call disease of language, cured by the ordinary nostrum of folk-etymology. I have often been in communication with the Rev.
We propose therefore briefly to examine this philosophy, so far as it claims to be such, and to see whether it in any way touches the validity of the argument from adaptability. Evolution may be considered both as an empirical fact and as an aetiological theory or philosophy.
But in all this there is no 'disease of language. These are frank nature-myths, 'aetiological, giving a fabulous reason for facts of nature. Mannhardt on Marchen. But Mannhardt goes farther. Now perhaps nobody will deny that some incidents in Marchen may have been originally suggested by nature-myths.
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