Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/25

Rh of the existence of our Society. I do refer to Andrew Lang, whose literary skill has made folklore popular, while his enlightened scepticism has kept it discreet; to Laurence Gomme, who may be called our co-founder, and whose addresses contributed so much to form our scientific methods; to Edward Clodd, who boldly asserted the principle of continuity as the key to the history of religions; to Alfred Nutt, a past-master in the poetry and literature of our subject; to Sidney Hartland, the zealous advocate of its practical utility. What message have I to offer which has not been better told by these? I have none, and I will not therefore attempt to do more than to repeat what I said when I had the honour to address the Anthropological Section of the British Association in 1898, and to draw your attention to anything bearing upon the views I then expressed which is afforded by recent researches of our members and others.

I then said that a generalisation for which we are fast accumulating material in folklore is that of the tendency of mankind to develop the like fancies and ideas at the like stage of intellectual infancy, akin to the generalisation that the stages of the life of an individual man present a marked analogy to the corresponding stages in the history of mankind at large, and to the generalisation that existing savage races present in their intellectual development a marked analogy to the condition of the earlier races of mankind. The fancies and ideas of the child resemble closely the fancies and ideas of the savage, and the fancies and ideas of primitive man. I further ventured to say that I did not see anything inherently unreasonable in the generalisation that the group of theories and practices which constitutes the great province of man's emotions and mental operations expressed in the term "religion" has passed through the same stages and produced itself in the same way from the earliest rude beginnings of the religious sentiment in primeval man as every other mental exertion;