Note 66 — Chapter II · THE CENTRAL MYTH

I have dealt in detail with his futile criticism at this point by way of putting the reader on his guard against the method of bluster. Comparative mythology is a difficult and thorny field, but it has to be explored; and Dr. Conybeare, whose study of the subject seems to have begun in the year of the issue of his book,66 does not even discern the nature of its problems. He avowedly supposes that totems are Gods; and he argues that the Jewish and Hellenistic world in the age of Augustus was at the mythopœic stage of the Australian aborigines of to-day. Of the phenomena of iconographic myth he is evidently quite ignorant; and his dithyramb on the sun myth tells of nothing but obsolete debate on the question. And it is in this connection that he informs his antagonists, in his now celebrated academic manner, that they are “a back number.”