Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/44

 32 Presidential Address.

student of folklore is entitled to rank as a psychologist even if he be innocent of formal erudition. For his docu- ments are human beings, not books, and are to be read by the light, not of learning, but of human sympathy and common sense.

At this point I break off, aghast at my own impertinence. Who am I that would preach, not having practised, to those vv'ho have practised and have taught me whatever I know about the folklorist's true destiny and mission? I rejoice to think that the psychologist among the folk is no mere dream of my own, but a reality ; which this famous Society of ours collectively represents, while its individual members, as for example Dr. Frazer, who, as- 1 said at the beginning, may justly claim the chief honours of the year, likewise afford many shining examples of the worker who works at folklore from within. What I have ven- tured to do to- night is merely to give an abstract, and perhaps unnecessarily academic, expression to the principle which for most of you, I daresay, is something taken for granted, something about which you have no more need to worry than a caterpillar has need to worry about its metliod of progression. Further, as one whose main concern has hitherto been with the psychological side of the anthro- pology of savages, 1 can at least offer to folklore, by way of graceful concession, priority of place and standing, in the light of the law, which to-night I have been trying to formulate, that psychology must always work from personal experience outwards, and from the more familiar to the less familiar.

F^olklore is no stud\' of the dead-alive, else it must itself be dead-alive too. It is rather a study of the live as mani- fested in the so-called surviving ; and this is indeed at once living and surviving in a deeper sense than is at first sight obvious. For the life of the folk, being rooted in nature, like the wild plant that it is, would seem to be hardier and more fit to endure than any form of the cultivated life ;