Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/31

 Rh groups custom is practically the only guide to conduct, and folklore, which is essentially the record of custom, is sometimes evidence of the highest value as a test of the rate of custom evolution.

It is inevitable that during the growth to maturity of a progressive science it should be compelled to revise its methods, to correct more than one misapprehension, and to discard many tentative explanations of the problems which it attempts to solve. We have no reason to feel discouraged if we find that our theories fail to withstand criticism. Some of us, perhaps, are inclined to look deeper into the millstone than the nature of the millstone allows. But theory-making is the best sign of vigorous life in any science, and, even if a theory prove to be mistaken, it serves at least to call attention to a problem, and the evidence collected in support of it remains at the service of some more successful theorist in the future. Speculation marks the healthy stage when we are passing from the "unanimity of the ignorant" to the "disagreement of the enquiring."

One of the chief misapprehensions against which we are bound to protest is the attempt to confuse the spheres of Comparative Religion and Comparative Theology. The former aims at comparing the beliefs of savage or barbaric tribes with those current in the lower strata of civilised nations; the latter uses these facts for purposes of speculation, to refute or support the theological or dogmatic schemes of some other religion. In the course of a discussion which followed the recent Universal Races Congress anthropologists were invited, as a class, to express some definite opinion on the nature of soul and body and their inter-relations. To this appeal Dr. Haddon gave the obvious reply that this is the business of the psychologist, theologian, or moral philosopher, not of the anthropologist; and that most anthropologists are content