Science Quote by William Robertson Smith

There is a scalpel hidden in Robertson Smith's polite Victorian syntax. "This being so, it follows" performs the tone of neutral deduction, but the target is anything but neutral: a scholarly habit of treating myths as the master key to ancient religion. He is not just rearranging research priorities; he is demoting an entire way of knowing that, by his time, had become fashionable in comparative religion - the idea that if you can decode a culture's stories, you've decoded its faith.

The subtext is methodological discipline with a side of iconoclasm. Mythology is seductive because it is legible: it gives modern readers a narrative to translate, symbols to interpret, a text to cite. Smith pushes against that textual bias. His work in the anthropology-inflected study of Semitic religions leaned toward ritual, social practice, and communal obligation as the engine of belief. Myths, in that frame, are often late, explanatory, even decorative - after-the-fact stories that rationalize what a community already does together. Putting myth front and center risks mistaking commentary for cause.

Context matters: late-19th-century scholarship was busy cataloging "primitive" religions, often through armchair readings of epic and folklore, with a Protestant assumption that religion equals doctrine and scripture. Smith is arguing that ancient faiths were not primarily systems of ideas. They were systems of action and belonging. The quiet aggression of "ought not" is a warning against projection: when modern academics privilege myths, they're really privileging their own comfort with texts over the messier evidence of rites, taboos, sacrifice, and social structure.