And this kind of vagueness in the primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final blow to anything in the nature of a science.
Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations.
A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.
As one of the enormous follies of folk-lore, let us take the case of the transmigration of stories, and the alleged unity of their source.
Story after story the scientific mythologists have cut out of its place in history, and pinned side by side with similar stories in their museum of fables. The process is industrious, it is fascinating, and the whole of it rests on one of the plainest fallacies in the world.
That a story has been told all over the place at some time or other, not only does not prove that it never really happened; it does not even faintly indicate or make slightly more probable that it never happened.
That a large number of fishermen have falsely asserted that they have caught a pike two feet long, does not in the least affect the question of whether any one ever really did so. That numberless journalists announce a Franco-German war merely for money is no evidence one way or the other upon the dark question of whether such a war ever occurred.
Doubtless in a few hundred years the innumerable Franco-German wars that did not happen will have cleared the scientific mind of any belief in the legendary war of '70 which did.
But that will be because if folk-lore students remain at all, their nature win be unchanged; and their services to folk-lore will be still as they are at present, greater than they know.
For in truth these men do something far more godlike than studying legends;they create them.
There are two kinds of stories which the scientists say cannot be true, because everybody tells them. The first class consists of the stories which are told everywhere, because they are somewhat odd or clever;there is nothing in the world to prevent their having happened to somebody as an adventure any more than there is anything to prevent their having occurred, as they certainly did occur, to somebody as an idea.
But they are not likely to have happened to many people.
The second class of their "myths" consist of the stories that are told everywhere for the simple reason that they happen everywhere.
Of the first class, for instance, we might take such an example as the story of William Tell, now generally ranked among legends upon the sole ground that it is found in the tales of other peoples.
Now, it is obvious that this was told everywhere because whether true or fictitious it is what is called "a good story;"it is odd, exciting, and it has a climax. But to suggest that some such eccentric incident can never have happened in the whole history of archery, or that it did not happen to any particular person of whom it is told, is stark impudence. The idea of shooting at a mark attached to some valuable or beloved person is an idea doubtless that might easily have occurred to any inventive poet.
But it is also an idea that might easily occur to any boastful archer.
It might be one of the fantastic caprices of some story-teller. It might equally well be one of the fantastic caprices of some tyrant.
It might occur first in real life and afterwards occur in legends.
