Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 27, 1916.djvu/49

Rh out—leaves him out, that is, as he exists in all the 'warmth and intimacy' of his conscious self-existence. Hence, if we are to treat of primitive values, it must be by means of a trans-personal appreciation of those values. We must somehow join souls with the so-called child of nature, in order to discover whether the sophisticated ethics of the militant state are really germane to the wild heart of him, whether the inner spring of his psychology is a lust of domination.

How are we to join souls with the savage? In a former address to this Society, I tried to show, in a quite general and untechnical fashion, how this might be done. I then uttered the paradox—at least, it might have seemed a paradox to any other Society but this—that the student of folk-lore, of all the anthropological band, has the best chance of understanding uncultivated humanity with an insight worthy of a true science of man. If he be a bit of a savage himself—as I hope that more than one of us here present may be—he can make friends with the savage at his door. The cottage stands half way between the city and the cave. Inveterate, yet ever young, the peasant cherishes most the things in our life that change least. Does the peasant form the backbone of the militant state?On a hasty view of the matter, he may seem to do so. No man can fight more sturdily than he to defend hearth and home. But does he love war or dominancy for its own sake? I leave the question to be answered by those who know him best. Here at any rate we have ready to hand a touchstone to be applied to this great controversy about the bent of the natural man. Speculation concerning cavemen 'that tare each other in their slime' is infinitely less profitable in comparison. If, how, and why the cave-men fought, we cannot tell for sure; though perhaps we can answer for the slime.

My own theory about the peasant, as I know him, and about people of lowly culture in general so far as I have