Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/26

 14 be impossible to separate off for special treatment that phase of the soul-life of mankind to which folklore and social anthropology pay exclusive attention, namely, the primitive or rudimentary type of mentality. But that history can ever be identified with the history of mere culture, of the mere outward integument and garb of the spirit, is a notion, fashionable at the present hour, to which Dr. Frazer gives no countenance whatever. A historian of culture, if ever there was one, he nevertheless sets himself from first to last to indite the first chapter of the recordable history of the human mind; and, with his shining example to light us on our way, we have only ourselves to blame if we turn aside to follow Jack-o'-lantern, and are presently engulfed in the dismal slough of materialism.

At this point I would like to pick a crow with a friend who is likewise a distinguished member of this Society. Dr. Rivers has recently read before the Sociological Society a brilliant paper entitled "Survival in Sociology." Having defined the proper task of the sociologist as "the study of the correlation of social phenomena with other social phenomena, and the reference of the facts of social life to social antecedents," he goes on to say:—"Only when this has been done, or at any rate when this process has made far greater advances than at present, will it be profitable to endeavour to explain the course of social life by psychological processes." Now in a footnote to this passage he tells us that he does not mean hereby in any way to exclude the study of these psychological processes, since "there is no study greater in interest, and none of greater importance if we are ever fully to understand the development of human society." His dictum, then, to the effect that it is not at present profitable to apply psychology to the explanation of the course of social life would seem to mean merely that it is not profitable so long as one is content to remain at the level of