Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/38

 26 Prcsidcnlia/ Address.

this so-called ' ethnological method ' done, or is it likely to do, for folklore ? In the first place, how are you going to define your ethnological province? I suppose all Europe at the very least must be regarded by the folklorist as his special area of characterization. Then, in the second place, how are our stratigraphical divisions to be made out ? The folklorist has always supposed that elements which must have originated at very various epochs are contained in our folk-customs ; but, as we see in the case of such a very careful piece of work as Mr. Chambers' History of tJic Mediaeval Stage, it is not possible beyond a certain point, even though there be historical records to assist us, to take stock of internal developments and external accretions in any strict order of succession. Failing, then, any certain clue to the actual regress of conditions as regards the culture of our peasants, — and the same thing holds of savage culture with even greater force, — we must school ourselves to discern the past as it lives on in the present. And this, as I have tried to show, is made possible onh^ by psychology, which enables us to apprehend the present not as an envisaged state but as a felt movement. To interpret the elan vital in terms of soul and will, — of the human purpose that means so much more than any amount of external properties, inherited or acquired, since it uses, misuses, or disuses them at pleasure, — such must be the aim of the historian who wants to put some life into his work. Now, we are not ourselves peasants ; so that, to project ourselves into the life of the peasant, and to arrive by intuition at the push of the life-force as manifested therein, is no easy task. Yet we are near enough in sympathy to our own folk to make it well worth the trying. Then, using the peasant as our bridge, let us proceed as best we can to do the same for the remoter savage. From folklore to the anthropology of savages, — that, I am sure, is the only sound method in social psychology. Not the child, as some have thought, but the peasant, is the true