Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/52

20 Presidential Address. unconsciously done homage to so absurd a principle, it is certainly not Tylor. He was neither so ignorant nor so wrong-headed as to suppose that history repeats itself by means of a parallelism of concrete cultures, each the product of a pure self-growth. Such a doctrine, indeed, is quite unthinkable. A strictly indigenous culture is as unknown to science as a strictly autochthonous race. Tylor's evolutionary hypothesis, however, is simply this: that certain pervasive elements of culture are susceptible of separate treatment and explanation, inasmuch as they can be extracted by analysis from the infinitely various concrete settings in which they occur. One may speak of them as customs, as Tylor often does; but really they are features of custom rather than samples of it — threads running through the tissue, not actual pieces of the stuff. The pervasive elements in question are the effects of our common mentality. Thus Tylor's evolutionary method is likewise a psychological one. Such effects do not display similarity only when the cultural conditions are otherwise similar. On the contrary, the special function of the comparative method is to testify to a unity in difference, as in this case constituted by the human mind; which, amid an endless diversity of outer circumstance, remains ever true to its destiny in virtue of an innate self-activity, unconditional, spontaneous, perennial as life itself.

I have already alluded to Tylor's doctrine that a survival may at times pass into a revival. Here we have ready to hand an admirable test of the value of his psychological method. Underlying primitive magic, he discerns a natural tendency to mistake casual associations and coincidences for real connexions. We can learn to overcome this tendency by means of a training in the logic of science; but it is always there, a permanent idolon of the mind. Hence, given conditions unfavourable to the predominance of the scientific temper, the lurking superstition will out; so that the magic-haunted phantasy of aboriginal