Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/66

34 occasion. I deliberately say "occasion," not "cause," because I regard soul as a prime-mover—the only one.

For the rest, the specific conditions brought into play by virtue of the culture-contact itself need to be subjected to detailed analysis, and to be classified according to the aspects of culture involved. Here, then, is the chosen ground to which I would point as the meeting-place and joint laboratory of the evolutionary and historical methods. While the historical method will attend chiefly to the assemblage of pre-existing conditions, the evolutionary, which is likewise essentially a psychological, method will be mostly concerned with the spontaneous origination, the live and truly evolutionary movement of spiritual awakening, that ensues upon the fact of cultural contact and cross-fertilization. Sometimes, the result of this quickening will wear an institutional and sociological guise, as in the startling case, regarded as by no means impossible by Dr. Rivers, of father-right resulting from the fusion of two matrilineal stocks. Even in such a case, however, when Dr. Rivers comes to formulate a "mechanism"—by which sinister expression he simply means a scheme—he frankly resorts to psychology in order to exhibit the true nature of the process. In other cases, the product of contact will be on the face of it a psychological fact, to which a psychological explanation may be applied without more ado. Thus, an aetiological myth may be generated to account for some unfamiliar importation, a process attributable to the stimulating effect on the imagination of the new and strange. As regards this last example, I am thinking, of course, of the illuminating paper on "The Sociological Significance of Myth" which Dr. Rivers read before this Society some five years ago.