Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/39

 Presidential Address.

■^ I

middle term of the anthropological syllogism. The first step is from town to country, and it is but another step on from the country to the wilds.

It remains to add that, while the true business of the folklorist, as I conceive it, is to think of his subject-matter as changing rather than stable, as living rather than dead, this does not mean that, from a psychological point of view, there will be no durable set of impressions yielded by the kinematographic process, nothing that can be made to serve as a measure of the flux by reason of its relative steadiness. On the contrary, one is tempted to exclaim about human nature when it is studied from within, ////i- ca change, phis cest la vicuie chose. One would almost be justified in maintaining, by way of counterblast to the usual paeans sung over the march of civilization, that the human species, having once for all broken away from the apes by some sort of sudden mutation, had ever since bred remarkably true to itself; the apparent multiplicity of its variations representing little more than so much indefinite fluctuation about a constant type. Now probably this would be to go too far. Yet such is certainly the sort of view to which the psychologist inclines after a study of the human emotions ; and these, as Mr. M'Dougall has tried to show in his Introduction to Social P sycliology, would seem in their turn to be indicative of certain steadfast currents of impulse, which govern the flow of the tide of human life as it were from the nether depths, even while on the surface the waves are being driven hither and thither by every wind that blows.

I would ask the folklorist, then, when he reports a piece of rustic custom, not to neglect the emotions that are hidden away behind the superficial sayings and doings, since the former belong not to the mere context and atmosphere, but to the very essence, of what he has to study ; and, standing as they do for the principle of vital continuity, afford a -truer measure of human evolution, so