Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/35

 President ial Address. 23

precision of statement on matters of belief, we encounter vagueness of thought and that inability to frame anything like a definition which results from lack of mental concen- tration and attention. The subject, when undergoing examination, becomes rapidly tired ; he is ready to say any- thing which he hopes may satisfy his inquisitor and relieve him from an unpleasant ordeal. This is, I believe, the experience of the most competent observers of savage races, and I suspect that the same may be said about our own rural population. The writer who is dependent upon published literature will do well to be cautious when some explorer supplies him with a set of Creeds or Articles of Religion of some backward people.

When we pass from a discussion of methods of enquiry to the question of origins, "the fundamentals," as the Scot- tish rustic theologian calls them, though the advance is striking, it is neither violent nor unexpected. " It were good therefore," says Francis Bacon, " that Men in their Innovations, would follow the Example of Time itselfe ; which, indeed Innovatetk greatly, but quietly, and by degrees, scarce to be perceived." '

In the first place, we observe a new aspect of the relation of myth to ritual. As I remarked last year, we have hitherto followed Robertson Smith in regarding myth as of lower value than cultus, — the one vague and transitory, the latter definite and persistent. We are now invited to accept an eirenicon, which re-establishes the importance of myth as a subject for study. This is suggested in two ways. First, the Cambridge school, represented by Miss Harrison, while admitting that myth may arise out of, or rather together with, the ritual, regards both as inter- dependent : the one as not prior to the other : they pro- bably arose together. " Ritual is the utterance of an emotion, a thing felt, in action, myth in words or thoughts. They arise pari passu. The myth is not at first aetlological ,

''Essays, xxiv., " Of Innovations," ed. W. Aldis Wright, 1887, p. 100.