Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/660

 646 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

SkepsiSj it is not likely to leave him at a pinch ; and the place to acquire the habit is in the impersonal and unemotional laboratory or quiet study. All this seems a good way from Homer ; but it is nevertheless true that the study of Homer calls for a considerable exercise of the critical faculty. The Greek mind was a lively and elusive one as far back as we can follow it; and the study of Homer well teaches the lesson that one must not be so ready to believe what he is deliberately told, as what he is able to find un- consciously revealed. To take a familiar instance : it is not neces- sary to believe that Achilles and Agamemnon quarreled; it is impossible to believe that Athena came down from Olympus and "seized the son of Peleus by his yellow locks"; but one must gather from this first book of the Iliad practicaUy the whole Hom- eric theory of disease and its treatment. One learns to differenti- ate the theme, which the hearer was meant to believe, and which was doctored up to his taste, from the setting, unconsciously given as the necessary framework upon which to develop a deal of romancing. This sort of cool-headed and dispassionate critical judgment is a thing, I say, which the sociologist must get, if he is to be worth much to (and so gain recognition from) his gen- eration ; and I believe that he must lay the foundation of it — such is the inherent weakness of the human intellect as against the emotions — in the sort of objective investigation of which the study of legendary materials forms a notable example.

Certainly also the study of Homeric society and religion will restrain a student from the tendency to adopt and cling to cut- and-dried classifications and categories, for, as we shall see, Homeric social phenomena clearly break through and escape all strict and exclusive norms of societal evolution.

Having cleared away some of the general aspects of the study of Homeric life, and so of Homeric religion, we may now seek to scan the religious system by itself, from some of the favorite viewpoints of the academic sociologist. First of all, this system is distinctly consistent as a whole with the other societal forms of the age, thus justifying the rule that the folkways, with the institutions developed from out the matrix which they form.