oa Friedrich Max Müller: Een Victoriaans geleerde

Müller has been thoroughly influenced by the romantic movement in his ideas on nature-mythology. With the clues of the etymological method he tried to ‘reveal’ the deeper meaning of myth and to show that a deeper symbolic order was at the basis of its seemingly chaotic surface. In the elaboration of his ideas he stressed the importance of metaphor and introduced the highly controversial concept of religion as a ‘disease of language’, which was also an inevatible by-product in the development of language. In his study of myth and religion he derived his schemes of classification and comparison from the comparative study of language and he postulated a close relationship between language, religion and ethnos. In his Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology Müller elaborated his ideas on the growth of religion in an evolutionistic way. He defined religion as the perception of the Infinite and claimed that this definition was based on concrete religions, in particular on ancient Indian religions, though it should be seen against the philosophical discourse of his day as well.