Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/40

 28 Presidential Address.

far as there is such a thing as distinct from aimless fluctua- tion and unrest, than does all the surface-display of history^ with its series of fashion-plates that tell us next to nothing about the man beneath the tailoring, whether he be at heart the same Old Adam or no.

Take, for instance, the so-called idea of luck, which on closer analysis turns out to be little more than a raw emotion evoked by a certain complex of conditions. As every folklorist knows, there are plenty of opportunities along the country-side of studying the feeling of luck, since it is wont to attach to ceremonial practices that are in the last throes of obsolescence. Now I strongly suspect that in this particular respect senility is equivalent to second childhood ; in other words, that the feeling of luck presides in much the same form over the final extinction and over the prime inception of a rite. Thus the student of savagery at present finds it almost impossible to tell whether the vague notions of viajia, tabu, and so on, which amount to little more than the presentiment of luck or ill-luck as bound up with certain things, actions, and situations, are rudimentary or vestigial, — an effect of early dawn or of lingering twilight. Let some folklorist provide us with a psychological study of the mental accompaniments of ritualistic degeneration and ritualistic invention, examining not merely the outward manifestations, but seeking to describe from within the actual experience of those classes of the community into whose scheme of existence luck enters most, — tillers of the ground, fishermen, miners, and indeed all who live hard and precariously, all who have to depend most on that racial happy-go-luckiness which is perhaps the most fundamental quality in man. Surely we are likely here, if anywhere, to discover criteria whereby the phenomena of progression and of retrogression in the savage's philosophy of luck may be distinguished ; since only thus can we learn by sympathetic intuition how the luck-feeling waxes or wanes, according as the external