Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/42

14 intuition of the Celtic mentality in its wholeness, could afford to rate trivialities, whether of archaeology or of scholarship, at their real worth. Some of his critics might complain that he was erratic in his opinions. Those who knew him intimately, however, would say rather that, in all its flights, his mind remained true to an unfailing sense of direction; such a faculty having been implanted in him by heredity, nurtured by an early training amid homely surroundings, and brought to full development by years of patient and intelligent study. Wales never bore a son who loved her more or understood her better.

The moral problem that confronts Europe to-day is: What sort of righteousness are we, individually and collectively, to pursue? Is the new righteousness to be realized in a return to the old brutality? Shall the last values be as the first? Must ethical process conform to natural process as exemplified by the life of any animal that secures dominancy at the expense of the weaker members of its kind?

Now this is not a question to which we as anthropologists can give a final answer. In such a capacity we are merely concerned with the history of man. But, though human values have a history, they are not fully explained and justified by their history. Ultimately, values are constituted by the will. A man's free choice determines that one course of action shall rank as better than another. At most, history can try to show that, on the average and in the long run, a certain type of conduct as compared with some alternative type leads to extinction on the part of those who choose to put it into practice. But if the free agent, thus threatened with extinction, boldly replies, 'For the sake of what I hold to be right and just, I am ready to persevere even unto the death,' there is an end to the argument. History has nothing more to say, unless possibly it be by way of an epitaph.