Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/33

 Pi'esidential Address. 21

as a body of custom may at the same time be inwardly apprehended as a phase of mind.

I have said enough, perhaps more than enough, con- cerning the ideal relations of sociology and psychology within the domain of folklore. After all, in such matters it is not so much logic as sheer practice that has the best right to lay down the law. According to the needs of the work lying nearest to our hand, let us play the sociologist or the psychologist, without prejudice as regards ultimate explanations. On one point only I would insist, namely, that the living must be studied in its own right and not by means of methods borrowed from the study of the lifeless. If a purely sociological treatment contemplates man as if there were no life in him, there will likewise be no life in it. The nemesis of a deterministic attitude towards history is a deadly dulness.

How, then, is psychology going to help us to keep folklore fresh and living? I suggest that it may do so by making the study of survivals turn on the question, — How and why do survivals survive 1 In folklore, I believe, antiquarianism may easily be overdone. We go about collecting odd bits of contemporary culture which seem to us to be more or less out of place in a so-called civilized world, and are exceedingly apt to overlook the truth that for old-fashioned minds the old fashions are as ever new. Now, of course, I am not against the study of origins. By all means let us try, so far as we can, to refer back this or that obsolescent institution or belief to some more or less remote past, reconstituted by means of the supposed analogies provided by backward peoples of to-day, among whom similar institutions or beliefs are seen to exist in full working order. But to make this the sole concern of folklore is to subordinate it as a mere appendix to the anthropology of savages. Folklore becomes an affair of shreds and tatters, since it institutes on its own account no study of human mind and society in their wholeness, but