Science Quote by William Robertson Smith

Even when a myth is factually false, Robertson Smith insists it is still intellectually expensive: it costs attention, repetition, authority. That insistence flips the usual Victorian reflex to treat myth as either childish error or coded philosophy. His target is the armchair interpreter who turns every story into a tidy allegory - gods as weather, heroes as the sun - and then congratulates himself for “decoding” it. Smith’s line is a demand for a harder, less flattering explanation: myths persist because they are bolted to lived practice.

The intent is methodological and quietly polemical. He’s arguing that “common sense” and “philosophy” don’t license freewheeling symbolism; they require causal accounts. If a community keeps telling a story, the question is not what abstract idea it might represent, but what concrete social work it performs. The subtext is proto-anthropological: belief is not primarily an exercise in private speculation; it’s maintained by public ritual, by calendars, sacrifices, taboos, communal meals - the things people actually do together. Myth, in this view, is often a narrative afterimage of ritual, a way of giving intelligible reasons for inherited customs whose original motives may be forgotten.

Context matters: late-19th-century comparative religion was torn between philological “nature myth” readings and newer, more empirical approaches. As a scientist by training and a biblical critic by vocation, Smith leans toward evidence you can observe in social life rather than meanings you can invent in the study. It’s a modern move: treat religion not as a riddle to solve, but as a system with institutions, incentives, and habits that leave fingerprints in story.