A little investigation sets this objection aside. Certain features must be common to all myths. A divinity must appear in them and his doings with men must be recorded. A reasonable being can hardly think at all without asking himself, “Whence come I, my fellows, and these things which I see? And what will become of us all?” So some myth is sure to be created at an early stage of thought which the parent can tell the child, the wise man his disciple, containing responses to such questions. But this reasoning from probability is needless, for the similarity of mythical tales in very distant nations, where no hypothesis of ancient intercourse is justified, is one of the best ascertained and most striking discoveries of modern mythological investigation.[159-1] The general character of “solar myths” is familiar to most readers, and the persistency with which they have been applied to the explanation of generally received historical facts, as well as to the familiar fairy tales of childhood, has been pushed so far as to become the subject of satire and caricature. The myths of the Dawn have been so frequently brought to public notice in the popular writings of Professor Max Müller, that their general distribution may be taken as well known. The same may be said of the storm myths. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who thought deeply on the religious nature of man, said early in this century: “Wholly similar myths can very readily arise in different localities, each independent of the others.”[160-1] This similarity is in a measure owing to the similar impressions which the same phenomenon, the sunrise or the thunder-storm for instance, makes on the mind--and to this extent the science of mythology is adequate to its explanation. But that it falls short is so generally acknowledged, that various other explanations have been offered. These may be classed as the skeptical explanation, which claims that the likeness of the myths is vastly exaggerated and much more the work of the scholar at his desk than of the honest worshipper; the historical explanation, which suggests unrecorded proselytisms, forgotten communications and the possible original unity of widely separated nations; the theological explanations, often discrepant, one suggesting caricatures of the sacred narrative inspired by the Devil, another reminiscences of a primeval inspiration, and a third the unconscious testimony of heathendom to orthodoxy;[161-1] and lastly the metaphysical explanation, which seems at present to be the fashionable one, expressed nearly alike by Steinthal and Max Müller, which cuts the knot by crediting man with “an innate consciousness of the Absolute,” or as Renan puts it, “a profound instinct of deity.”