Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/133

 Reviews. loi

and paired afresh every spring, like birds. Some considerations pointing to such an evolution can certainly be adduced. But M. Mauss has left this speculation untouched ; his subject is the present organization. As to this, even if my criticism of his presentation hold good, he has performed a much-needed service in drawing attention to the remarkable alternation of organization. It corresponds to the alternation observed in several North American tribes, notably the Kwakiutl and the Hupa. Social life passes, as he says, through a sort of regular rhythm. It is not equable, but has at one season a moment of apogee and at another a moment of hypogee. This sort of rhythm of dispersion and concentration, of individual life and collective life, is found among other peoples, and perhaps may be a widely general law. To what extent it answers to such a description is not to be enquired here. Wherever it may be found it is clear that its extreme manifestations can only occur where the climate, like that of the Arctic littoral inhabited by the Eskimo, favours them, and where the population has not yet wholly emerged from the condition of savagery.

At all events, M. Mauss concludes, the Eskimo present us with a striking verification of the sociological hypothesis that social life under all its forms, moral, religious, juridical or whatever they may be, is the function of its material substratum and varies with this substratum, that is to say, with the mass, the density, the form and the composition of the human groups of which it is composed. Partial illustrations of the truth of this hypothesis have been produced before, in the evolution of the penal law and of other branches of jurisprudence, and the change of religious beliefs with changing circumstances and the growth of civilization. But these may not have been wholly due to morphological changes; they may have been accompanied or preceded by others which have escaped research. Among the Eskimo societies, on the other hand, we see that at the precise moment when the form of the group changes, religion, law and morals undergo a parallel transformation. The experience is crucial, and the result of this enquiry is that hence- forth at least one sociological proposition has been relatively demonstrated.