What is still true of Brittany was once equally true of Britain, and although the individuality of the Gael has now largely been submerged by prosaic Anglo-Saxondom, the poetic temperament of the chivalrous and dreamy Celt was essentially a frame of mind that cared only for the heroic, the romantic, and the beautiful.
The science of etymology as practised to-day is unfortunately blind to this poetic element which was, and to some extent still is, an innate characteristic of "uncivilised" and unsophisticated peoples. Archbishop Trench, one of the original planners and promoters of _The New English Dictionary_, was not overstating when he wrote: "Let us then acknowledge man a born poet.... Despite his utmost efforts, were he mad enough to employ them, he could not succeed in exhausting his language of the poetical element which is inherent in it, in stripping it of blossom, flower, and fruit, and leaving it nothing but a bare and naked stem. He may fancy for a moment that he has succeeded in doing this, but it will only need for him to become a little better philologer to go a little deeper into the study of the words which he is using, and he will discover that he is as remote from this consummation as ever."
Nevertheless, current etymology _has_ achieved this inanity, and has so completely dismissed the animate or poetic element from its considerations that one may seek vainly the columns of Skeat and Murray for any hint or suggestion that language and imagination ever had anything in common. According to modern teaching language is a mere cluster of barbaric yawps: "No mystic bond linked word and thought together; utility and convenience alone joined them".[51]
Words, nevertheless, were originally born not from grammarians but amid the common people, and _pace_ Mr. Clodd they enshrine in many instances the mysticism and the superstitions of the peasantry. How can one account, for instance, for the Greek word _psyche_, meaning _butterfly_, and also _soul_, except by the knowledge that butterflies were regarded by the ancients as creatures into which the soul was metamorphosised? According to Grimm, the German name for stork means literally _child-_, or _soul-bringer_; hence the belief that the advent of infants was presided over by this bird. But why "_hence_"? and why put the cart before the horse? If one may judge from innumerable parallels of word-equivocation the legends arose not from the accident of similar words, nor from "misprision of terms," or from any other "disease of language," but the creatures were named _because of_ the attendant legend. It is common knowledge that in Egypt the animal sacred to a divinity was often designated by the name of that deity; similarly in Europe the bee, a symbol of the goddess _Mylitta_, was called a _mylitta_, and a bull, the symbol of the god _Thor_, was named a _thor_. We speak to-day of an _Adonis_, because Adonis was a fabulously lovely youth, and parallel examples may be found on almost every hand. Irish mythology tells of a certain golden-haired hero named Bress, which means _beautiful_, whence we are further told that every beautiful thing in Ireland whether plain, fortress, or ale, or torch, or woman, or man, was compared with him, so that men said of them "That is a Bress". Elsewhere and herein I have endeavoured to prove that this principle was of worldwide application, and that it is an etymological key which will open the meaning of many words still in common use. It is a correlative fact that the names of specific deities such as Horus, Hathor, Nina, Bel, etc., developed in course of time into generic terms for any _Lord_ or _God_.