Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/30

 1 8 Presidential Address.

suffering a perceptible check. Such must be the real, though unexpressed, ground of liis attribution of useless- ness. P^is right to make such a judgment must rest on the study of the soul of the people, a study so sympathetic and profound as to have revealed to him the dominant trend of their united purposes. Otherwise, we stand com- mitted to that naive conception of human evolution which pictures all the peoples of the earth as proceeding along a single path of advance, and consequently identifies the useless with whatever does not directly lead to the supreme position occupied by our noble selves.

Or here, again, is another simple way of showing the misleading nature of the parallel suggested by Dr. Rivers be- tween geology and the study of survivals. It brings us back to our former principle that method must conform to subject-matter, not subject-matter to method. The respec- tive methods of geology and of human history must remain as the poles asunder for the obvious reason that the earth is dead, while man is alive. For a philosopher, indeed, such as Fechner, the earth may embody the soul of a god, and there is no justification for assuming it to be wholly and merely material. Rather Fechner would have us treat the earth as our special guardian angel. We can pray to it, he thinks, as men pray to their saints.- 'But for the geologist the physical nature of the earth constitutes no abstract aspect, but a substantive fact. According to the strictly scientific view, which goes back at least as far as Demo- critus, the earth is no more than a venerable rubbish- heap. Well, so be it. Let science turn the earth into stone. But man does not lend himself so readil)' to theoretical petrifaction. Philosophy apart, it is unprofit- able even for purely scientific purposes to ignore the animating mind and will, and explain the various manifesta- tions of human life in terms of the carnal tenement. To resolve the history of man into a chapter of mechanics may

-Cf. William James, A Pliiralistii Universe (1909), p. 153.