Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/32

 22 retain their inwardness as expressions of the human will. Transvaluation then, not transformation, calls attention to the living soul of cultural process. It reminds us that our task is to study not merely its "how," but its "why."

It may be thought that function, by an enlargement of its biological meaning, can be made to cover the implications here claimed for value. But function, in common with form, had far better, I think, be confined to its proper sphere, namely, that of an exterior history. Besides, where function is at its vanishing-point, value of a sort may still be predicated. Take the case of a custom that to all appearance is utterly effete—the so-called fossil, in fact. It might fairly be judged functionless. Why, then, when so obviously we ought to be done with it, is it allowed to linger on? Because it has what may be termed prescriptive value. After all, the functional view of life is apt to be rather hard and narrow. Your conservative is the born liberal. The squirarchy is long-suffering with the gipsy; whereas bureaucratic efficiency would altogether deny him his idle place in the sun. Sheer customariness, in short, amounts to a kind of value—one that for the most part is apprehended subconsciously, yet is none the less inwardly satisfying. The appeal of the familiar counts among the great equilibrating forces of the moral world. It helps us to maintain a comfortable automatism; and, so long as we do this solely in regard to such things as matter little, we are the better enabled, through economy of effort, to concentrate on the things that matter much. Thus the antiquated custom, though it seem functionless on a sociological or external view, is perceived on a psychological estimate to have value, if only because it is restful—because it passively ministers to the easy-going, effort-saving side of our life.

It is not in value, however, so much as in change of value, that we are now immediately interested. One has