Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/32

 20 Presidejitial Address.

It is quite legitimate to regard culture, or social tradition, in an abstract way as a tissue of externalities, as a robe of many colours woven on the loom of time by the human spirit for its own shielding or adorning. Moreover, for certain purposes which in their entirety may be termed sociological, it is actually convenient thus to concentrate attention on the outer garb. In this case, indeed, the garb may well at first sight seem to count for everything ; for certainly a man naked of all culture would be no better than a forked radish. Nevertheless, folklore cannot out of deference to sociological considerations afford to commit the fallacy of identifying the clothes worn with their live wearer. Such a doctrine were fit only for tailors. - Human history is no Madame Tussaud's show of decorated dummies. It is instinct with purposive movement through and through ; and must so be represented by folklore, — kinematographi- cally as it were. Now it is the special business of psy- chology to emphasize the dynamic side of life, or in other words the active conditions that enable us to suck strength and increase out of the passive conditions comprised under the term environment. It is because we have experience in our inmost being of what M. Bergson would term " real duration," that the notion of development becomes possible for us at all. Hence I would maintain that in the hier- archy of the sciences psychology is superior to sociology, for the reason that as the study of the soul it brings us more closely into touch with the nature of reality than does the study of the social body. Meanwhile, in relation to folklore, which is concrete, psychology and sociology alike are entitled to rank as no more than methods, inasmuch as they are but abstract. Folklore in its wide embrace can and must find room for them both, itself remaining aloof from all onesidedness, seeing that it stands for a whole department of. the historical study of mankind. The business of this Society is to seek to know the folk in and through their lore, so that what is outwardly perceived