Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/27

 Rh would appear, inasmuch as survivals survive, that they are not quite dead after all—that in some humble and surreptitious way of their own they help to constitute and condition the living present, whether it be for worse or for better. From such a point of view, then, it seems of chief importance to enquire what survival is as a process; and, further, how this particular process is related to the other processes that go with it to make up the general movement of history. In short, a dynamic study of the facts relating to survival keeps in touch with reality as manifested in the life-force. A static treatment, on the contrary, can but result in a bloodless typology; while, if it be likewise pseudo-dynamic, and array its arbitrary seriation of types in the guise of a time-order, so much the worse.

Let us, in this connexion, note how the study of savage culture has of late correspondingly felt the need for a more positively dynamic method. That branch of the science of man has, indeed, always sought to proceed upon genetic lines, having from the first been associated with the Darwinian theory of the development of life. But the very comprehensiveness of outlook thus acquired—the age-long and world-wide extent of the interpretation of human history thereby demanded—for a long time caused a somewhat sweeping style of explanation to be attempted. Yet it is easy to exaggerate the evils due to such premature generalization. I do not hold with the current depreciation of the work of the great pioneers of anthropology, to the tacit glorification of their smug successors. One is reminded of the absurd wren in the fable who mounted sky-high on the eagle's back. To ignore what we owe to our spiritual ancestry amounts to a denial of the doctrine of development, and hence is disloyal in two ways at once. The whole history of science proves that it is legitimate to leap from a narrow groundwork of facts to the widest generalizations, so long as the complementary task of verification is thereafter duly