Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/65

 presidential Address. 33

not insist further on a point which Dr. Rivers has amply stated, if indeed he has not overstated it ; since he says " the only way in which the culture of an immigrant people can be carried about the world is in a psychological form, in the form of sentiments, beliefs, and ideas." ^^

Lastly, we come to the most interesting of all the conditions involved in culture-contact, namely, the new conditions brought into play by the actual contact itself. Dr. Rivers finds fault with Dr. Graebner for conceiving ethnological intermixture as a mechanical process, and suggests that the notion of a chemical process comes nearer to the mark.^""' I confess that such analogies drawn from the physical sciences and redolent of the " lower categories " seem to me one and all misleading. We must keep steadily in view the fact that culture-contact is, for the science of culture, essentially a psychical process. Only by applying the conception of soul, taken in its individual and social aspects together, can we do justice to such develop- ment as is brought about by a synthesis of spiritual elements — such as culture-contact truly is when viewed, not from some lower standpoint, but from the standpoint of culture itself. Now, as regards psychological " laws," Dr. Rivers writes : " I have never heard of them, and I am afraid I should not believe them if I heard.""'' I dare not, then, offer him one, but would nevertheless call attention to what is at least an accepted working principle in the domain of individual psychology. It is this, that the occasion of the development of the higher processes of thought is conflict arising among our sense impressions. I would venture, then, to suggest that some very similar principle ought to be provided in the domain of social psychology to account for the spiritual awakening which a clash of cultures in circumstances otherwise favourable may

"■^ Sociological Review, ix. (1916), 8. ••'" History of ]\Ielanesian Society, ii. 5S5. '^'° Sociological Review, ix. (1916), 9. C