“Critically compare the views of E. B. Tylor and Max Müller on religion.” (2021)
Edward Burnett Tylor and Friedrich Max Müller, both at Oxford, helped found the scientific study of religion. Each sought its origin through an evolutionary lens, but Tylor reasoned from ethnography to spirits, Müller from Sanskrit philology to nature and the infinite.
Criteria-wise comparison
| Criterion | Tylor | Müller |
|---|---|---|
| Discipline and method | Anthropology; comparative ethnography, doctrine of survivals | Philology; comparison of Indo-European languages and myths: “he who knows one, knows none” |
| Key works | Primitive Culture (1871) | Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873); editor, Sacred Books of the East |
| Definition | Belief in Spiritual Beings | A faculty for apprehending the Infinite |
| Origin | Animism: soul inferred from dreams and death | Naturism: awe at sky, sun, dawn; names become gods through a “disease of language” |
| Faculty | Reason, erring | Feeling and language |
| Verdict on religion | A primitive error; ethnography a “reformer’s science” exposing survivals | A genuine, if distorted, sense of the infinite |
Common ground
- Both offered individual, intellectualist explanations: religion begins in a mind confronting experience.
- Both were evolutionist and armchair scholars without fieldwork.
- Both made comparison central and treated religion as a subject for science.
Critical assessment
- Émile Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912): both make religion an illusion and miss the sacred–profane divide. Nature is too regular to inspire awe, and dreams need no sacred reading.
- Andrew Lang attacked Müller’s solar mythology and found “high gods” among simple peoples, upsetting Tylor’s sequence.
- Bronisław Malinowski objected that tribal people are busy with gardening and fishing, not brooding over dreams.
- E. E. Evans-Pritchard (Theories of Primitive Religion, 1965) called such origin theories unverifiable conjectural history.
- On balance, Tylor’s ethnographic range and concept of culture proved more durable. Müller’s reliance on Indo-European texts left his theory narrow, though his comparative “science of religion” survived it.
Indian illustration
- Müller’s Vedic scholarship shaped colonial and nationalist images of India; Swami Vivekananda met him at Oxford in 1896. Naturism fits Vedic hymns to Agni and Ushas, but not tribal religion.
- Santhal worship of bongas in hills and groves looks Tylorian, while D. N. Majumdar’s account of the Ho bonga as diffuse power supports R. R. Marett’s animatism over both.
- The current Sarna code demand presents such beliefs as a living faith, not a survival.
Conclusion
Tylor gave the more lasting method, Müller the more lasting comparative vision. Both failed as theories of origin because they placed religion in the solitary mind rather than in society and practice.