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We also find Mannhardt, in 1877, starting from the known legend and rural survival in phrase and custom and so advancing to the unknown the name Demeter. The philologists commence with the unknown, the old name, Demeter Erinnys, explain it to taste, and bring the legend into harmony with their explanation. I cannot say, then, that I share Mr. Max Muller's impression.
Like ail Dutch students, he mixed freely with future lawyers, clergymen, philosophers, and philologists, and it is often said that while the University teaches young men chiefly sound methods of work, students in Holland acquire quite as much instruction from each other as from their professors.
In these words, as in many others, we can see that it is never safe to guess the derivation of words. Many of the old philologists used to do this, and then write down their guesses as facts. This caused a great deal of extra work for modern scholars, who will not, of course, accept any "derivation" for a word until they have clear proof that it is true.
Concerning the word Patala, which literally means the opposite side, a recent discovery of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, whom I have already mentioned in the preceding letters, is interesting, especially if this discovery can be accepted by philologists, as the facts seem to promise.
Philologists now admit that conjugations, declensions, etc., originally existed as distinct words, since joined together; and as such words express the most obvious relations between objects and persons, it is not surprising that they should have been used by the men of most races during the earliest ages.
Yet a clear and unmistakable tendency to strictness in matters of religion and morality was alive in many of the philologists, and it is a proof of small knowledge of the period, if the whole class is condemned. Yet many, and among them the loudest speakers, were guilty.
We must therefore seek to discover whether, in addition to the various causes assigned for myth in earlier ages, and still more in modern times by our great philologists, ethnologists, and philosophers of every school causes which are for the most part extrinsic there be not a reason more deeply seated in our nature, which is first manifested as a necessary and spontaneous function of the intelligence, and which is therefore intrinsic and inevitable.
Indeed, modern comparative philologists have shown beyond doubt that a few southern forms of speech had already penetrated to the primitive English marshland by the shores of the Baltic and the mouth of the Elbe before the great exodus of the fifth century; and we know that Roman or Byzantine coins, and other objects belonging to the Mediterranean civilisation, are found abundantly in barrows of the first Christian centuries in Sleswick the primitive England of the colonists who conquered Britain.
"A little town Which that yeleped is Bob Up and Down Under the Blee in Canterbury way." The name Harbledown is derived by local philologists from Bob up and Down, and the hilly nature of the country fully justifies the title. Here stands Lanfranc's Lazar-house, "so picturesque even now in its decay, and in spite of modern alterations which have swept away all but the ivy-clad chapel of Lanfranc."
The reason of this want of piety and reverence must lie deeper; and many are in doubt as to whether philologists are lacking in artistic capacity and impressions, so that they are unable to do justice to the ideal, or whether the spirit of negation has become a destructive and iconoclastic principle of theirs.
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