Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/26

16 practical man—the food-controller, as it were—to see to it that our produce is not wasted. Nevertheless, how can we afford to shut our eyes to the meaning of this phase of downright revolution through which the world is passing? Suppose it possible for us to make clean abstraction of what such a crisis portends for us as citizens, even so as pure observers and theorists we can surely find here matter for thought in plenty. For in what way chiefly does the revolutionary tendency of the times make itself felt? Are we not conscious, before all else, of a wholesale shifting of values—an utter derangement of the hierarchy of established interests and activities constituting that "old order" which we were brought up to accept? In a word, then, the "transvaluation" of culture provides us with a theme at once topical and, as I hope to show, of fundamental significance for our science. Such transvaluation, I would even contend, yields the ultimate conception of a dynamic type whereby the scope and method of folklore studies ought to be determined.

In the first place, then, we shall all doubtless be agreed that we cannot for methodological purposes dispense with a dynamic conception of some sort; in other words, that folklore research must be regulated by reference to an object which is defined generally as a kind of movement or process. For to describe our science as the study of survivals is apt to prove misleading, at any rate for the outsider. The latter is ready on the strength of the phrase to set us down as mere curiosity-hunters—amiable triflers who collect fossils for fun. Now it might seem enough to reply to such an imputation on our scientific character that we do indeed collect fossils, but in the spirit of the palaeontologist, for whom the inanimate relics bear witness to a life that is gone. But I believe that we should do better to reject the fossil metaphor altogether. As I have argued before this Society on a former occasion, it