Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/31

 Rh institution out of its remaining fragments, these are really spoilt for his purpose if they turn out to have been readapted. I hope that it will not sound a paradox if I reply to this argument that the original institution in question never existed. Origins are relative, and the regress of conditions is endless. The supposed prototype is but an effect of historical mirage. However far we pursue it, the steadfast illusion keeps its distance, while shifting sands are about our feet as before. There never was a time, in short, when the interplay of old and new did not go on, exactly as it does now—when survival and revival, degeneration and regeneration, were not pulsating together in the rhythm of the social life. It is at least as necessary to read the present into the past as the past into the present. Let it, then, be an article of our creed to recognize the immanence of folklore. Old-fashioned stuff though it be, it belongs to the here and now; and so may at any moment renew its youth in the way that old fashions have. The motto of folklore as of fashion in dress is, Never say die!

Does the transvaluation of culture, then, supply the formula we want? I suggest that it will be found adequate. For it certainly conforms to the two criteria already laid down. Firstly, it is dynamic, connoting a process to be examined. Secondly, it has not the unilinear sense of such a term as degeneration, or even, if taken strictly, the "blessed word" evolution, but indicates process without limiting it to a single direction. It remains to show that it has a further merit, namely, that of signifying cultural process as studied from within. Thus for many purposes it might seem enough to speak of transformation. But change of form is as an object relative to a purely external view of things. It cannot, therefore, stand for the last word in anthropology, unless we are prepared to renounce our birthright of self-knowledge. Even when treated as facts—as they must be in the historical