Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/30

 18 taught us, the feeling with which self-murder is regarded suggests a manifestation of the shock given to the collective mentality of the group by the tragical death of one of its members. In a suit recently decided in the Wandsworth County Court the Judge refused to cancel the lease of a house reputed to be haunted, on the ground that, the existence of ghosts not being recognised by the law, no pranks alleged to have been played by them could be held to justify the breach of a specific contract. "We suspect," sagely remarks a writer in The Times, that the result of a few such cases so determined would be to diminish the number of ghost stories now afloat and accepted."

We have thus to deal with a class of beliefs which seriously affect the lives of considerable sections of our people. In this fact lies one justification for our studies. A second is to be found in the value of such beliefs from the historical standpoint. It is needless to reopen the vexed question,—How far can the evidence of folklore be used by the historian? But we must bear in mind that the most backward races, the Veddas, for instance, have no mythology, no tribal tradition, no stories of the origin of man, no accounts of their own beginnings. Even people in a somewhat higher stage of culture display a strangely monotonous uniformity in their explanations of phenomena and of the origin and destiny of the human race. This mental inertia, lack of curiosity and imagination, are at once the result and the cause of stagnation in culture.

Myth, then, is the record, often the only record, of man's groping in the darkness, of his successive attempts to solve the riddles of the universe and of his own mind. It is something more than the excuse of a stupid man for his lack of understanding. In other words, myths embody the results of his accumulated experiences, and a race destitute of myth is necessarily unprogressive. In all primitive