Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/45

 Presidential Address. 33

which springs out of it, and, in time grown tired as it were, reverts to it again. Even if, as we must all hope, the life of man be no mere process, but a progress involving increase and betterment in the long run, it is in the life of the folk that we must seek the principle of growth. The continuous life of the folk constitutes as it were the germ-plasm of society. Unless the external conditions, that so largely make up the apparatus of so-called civilization, so act on the social body that their effects are transmitted to this germinal clement and cause it to be itself tranformed, then our cultural acquisitions are vain, because utterly transient, in the judgment of history. Thus it may be that the true answer to the question " Why do survivals survive .-'" is this : that they survive because they are the constantly renewed symptoms of that life of the folk which alone has the inherent power of surviving in the long run.

Let me close with a quotation from a recent acute study of the psychology of our British working-class :

" Wei' said the young university man. . ., "we look at things from the point of view of civilization, whereas they only look at them from the point of view of mankind."

"Mankind remains," I answered, "but civilizations snuff out, mainly because they refuse to take sufficient count of mankind."'^

R. R. Marett


 * Seems So !, by Stephen Reynolds and Bob and Tom Woolley (1911), p. 124.