Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/60

 2 8 Presidential Addresi.

of the ethnological method, such as Dr. Rivers and Professor KlHot Smith. On the other hand, the evolu- tionary school can claim adherents so powerful as Sir James Frazer and Mr. Hartland ; while at Oxford, if onl\- out of sheer loyalty to Tylor, some of us may always incline towards a psychological interpretation of primitive culture. Now how deep does the difference cut ? Is there any need to prosecute science in the spirit of partisans t We have seen how Tylor and Gomme paid equal homage to both methods, though as anthropologist and as folklorist they severally applied a single and an opposite method to the work immediately confronting them. Has not the time come, then, when we may aspire to a joint use of the historical and the evolutionary methods .'' Logically they are not incompatible, but would rather seem to be complementary to each other. Cannot we make them practicall}' so }

I venture to suggest, then, in the name of those masters of method, Tylor and Gomme, who realized that the paths to the truth are many but converging, that we bnng our divided forces to bear on a theme that promises exercise for them all — I mean the psychology of culture-contact. I cannot, indeed, claim to have thought out in any detail how such a subject ought to be treated. Even had I done so, I could not attempt at this late hour to put my thoughts into words. But I hail it as a sign of the times that Dr. Rivers, whose passion for the strictest scientific method first led him to the study of social organization, and thenceforward to the study of ethnological intermixture, has tended more and more as he went on to eke out history by means of psychological considerations of a general nature. Being himself a psychologist of no mean repute, he was never, as some hot-heads would seem to be, for excluding psychology from the science of culture altogether. Yet for a long time he cried " to-morrow " to his poor handmaid, eager to serve. She must sit in the cold and wait. But somehow she has