Ancient myths in general thus acquire meanings considerably different from those ascribed to them by comparative mythologists. Though these last may be in part correct, yet if the foregoing argument is valid, they can scarcely be correct in their main outlines. Indeed, if we read the facts the other way upward, regarding as secondary or additional, the elements that are said to be primary, while we regard as primary, certain elements which are considered as accretions of later times, we shall, I think, be nearer the truth. The current theory of the myth is that it has grown out of the habit of symbolizing natural agents and processes, in terms of human personalities and actions. Now, it may in the first place be remarked that, though symbolization of this kind is common among civilized races, it is not common among races that are the most uncivilized. By existing savages, surrounding objects, motions, and changes, are habitually used to convey ideas respecting human transactions. It needs but to read the speech of an Indian chief to see that just as primitive men name one another metaphorically after surrounding objects, so do they metaphorically describe one another's doings as though they were the doings of natural objects. But assuming a contrary habit of thought to be the dominant one, ancient myths are explained as results of the primitive tendency to symbolize inanimate things and their changes, by human beings and their doings. A kindred difficulty must be added. The change of verbal meaning from which the myth is said to arise, is a change opposite in kind to that which prevails in the earlier stages of linguistic development. It implies a derivation of the concrete from the abstract; whereas at first abstracts are derived only from concretes: the concrete of abstracts being a subsequent process. In the words of Prof. Max Müller, there are "dialects spoken at the present day which have no abstract nouns, and the more we go back in the history of languages, the smaller we find the number of these useful expressions" (_Chips_, vol. ii., p. 54); or, as he says more recently--"Ancient words and ancient thoughts, for both go together, have not yet arrived at that stage of abstraction in which, for instance, active powers, whether natural or supernatural, can be represented in any but a personal and more or less human form." (_Fraser's Magazine_, April, 1870.) Here the concrete is represented as original, and the abstract as derivative. Immediately afterward, however, Prof. Max Müller, having given as examples of abstract nouns, "day and night, spring and winter, dawn and twilight, storm and thunder," goes on to argue that, "as long as people thought in language, it was simply impossible to speak of morning or evening, of spring and winter, without giving to these conceptions something of an individual, active, sexual, and at last, personal character." (_Chips_, vol. ii., p. 55.) Here the concrete is derived from the abstract--the personal