Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/67

 Presidential Address. 35

I have exhausted your patience, without by any means exhausting a theme which takes us down to the roots of the science of culture, the science of Tylor and Gomme. It must suffice to have tried to show two things : firstly, how in the past the evolutionary and historical methods, with which the names of Tylor and Gomme are severallyasso- ciated, were used by them, yet never abused ; and, secondly, liow in the future we might hope to bring these methods into closer co-operation by concentrating on the general conditions, and especially on the psychology, of culture- contact. If I have sounded the psychological note too strong!)', I would ask you to bear with my individual bent or bias. For, as compared with sociology, psychology has always seemed to me to have the first word and the last ; just as thought comes first and last as compared with speech. A meaning is there before we try to put it into words, and, though the words help it out, yet they always lag a little behind our ideal meaning. So too, then, I conceive the soul of man, in its individual and social capacities taken together, to be a self-active power which both originates institutions, and, though developing through their aid, ever transcends them, ever seeks to transmute them so that they may subserve still higher and more ideal ends. Tylor called our science the science of culture, and it is a good name. But let us not forget that culture stands at once for a body and a life, and that the body is a function of the life, not the life of the body.

R. R. Marett.