Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/53

 Presidential Address. 21

Australia comes to life again in the witch-mania of a Europe which, paradoxically enough, is in the throes of an intellectual and spiritual re-birth. Or, again, Tylor explains the animism of the savage as a natural interpre- tation of his dreams and visions. Such experiences are common to us all, and it thus remains open to us all to attribute a serious import, say, to the visionary appearance of one who is recently dead. Hence ancient animism has its counterpart — Tylor roundly says its revival — in modern spiritualism. The cultural conditions are altogether diffe- rent, yet the mental attitude recurs. These illustrations will suffice to show at once how Tylor uses his evolutionary method, and how it serves the ultimate purpose of his writings. For he was not one of those who set up a monu- ment to savage unreason. Rather he was bent on proving how reasonable the savage is according to his lights. The history of human culture, he insists, is all of a piece. Man has worked his long way upward by one and the same expedient, namely, "by the stern method of trial and error." ^^ Tylor was ever a kindly soul, as indeed every good anthropologist must be ; and this, his main con- clusion, is as kindly as it is true.

I pass on. Not but what I should like to say much more, did time allow, in praise of Tylor's methods, and in particular of his psychological method. So, too, were I to pursue this theme further, I might be led on to discuss how far it is possible, while continuing to use his psycho- logical method as such in exactly his way, yet to modify the psychological doctrine with which the mental science of his day supplied him ; so as, for instance, to allow feel- ing and will a fuller jurisdiction by the side of thought, or, again, to make more of the specific mental effects of social intercourse and tradition. But appreciation rather than criticism is appropriate to the present occasion. In the '^'^ Mac millan's Magazine, xlvi. (18S2), 86.