Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/469

 Revieivs. 441

" folklore." But to treat " folk " as equivalent to " society " or '' community " seems an outrage on the English language, for which it is no sufficient excuse to plead that it imperfectly echoes a German phrase of ambiguous import.

To examine Professor Wundt's results in detail would be a task demanding far more space than is at my disposal. It matters the less because the special treatises of the future will doubtless occupy themselves with the particular theories of one who expresses a view, and, for the most part, a novel view on almost all classical questions of origins — the origin of exogamy, the origin of the bow- and-arrow, the origin of clothes, the origin of language, and so forth and so on. I would here simply call attention to his main scheme of topics, according to which human history is divided into four "ages," styled respectively the pretotemic or (relatively) primitive age, the totemic age, the age of gods and heroes, and the age of advance " towards " humanity. Anthropologists have of late looked somewhat askance on " unilinear " arrangements of this kind as tending unduly to simplify the actual course of organic evolution with its endless ramifications and recrossings. Professor Wundt's answer would appear to be that he leaves the tracing of the complex genealogical process to the ethnologist, reserving for himself, as a psychologist, the right to discover beneath the superficial play of eddies and cross-currents the movement of a " stream of tendency " that, in accordance with the general laws of psychogenesis, makes on the whole in a certain direction. His claim to such a right I would gladly support, and may go so far as to say that some such series of " ages" — I would prefer to say " stages " — as he postulates appear to me to accord with the relevant facts.

I am most dubious about his first or pretotemic stage. He seems to me to pick and choose somewhat arbitrarily among the peoples who appear to be without totemism or its survivals. Thus the Eskimo, Chukchees and Koryaks are usually held to be such peoples. Yet they have no type-value for him, presumably because their culture is otherwise not so primitive as it ought, on his theory, to be. Moreover, while it may be legitimate to make mental characteristics depend on a certain condition of society, it is surely rather hazardous to go on to connect therewith definite