Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 29, 1918.djvu/36

 26 This is, as it were, a horizontal process. If the main interests of life be conceived to stretch longitudinally from pole to pole of the sphere of culture, movement across these lines can, for analytic purposes, be distinguished from movement up or down. A familiar illustration of this kind of change is afforded by the transference of a theme from religion to art. A discarded rite colours an incident in a folk-story; a mask, once of sacred import, decorates the actor in a secular play; a charm against the evil eye becomes an ornament; and so on. What happens in such a case? Regarding it from the psychological standpoint appropriate to the study of value, we may say that a new interest, or fresh system of meanings, has assimilated—or, as a psychologist might put it technically, has apperceived—the theme in question. Now, whereas it was easy to apply the notion of value to the other type of process termed change of standing, since standing and social repute almost come to the same thing, it is not so obvious how change of meaning—that is, assimilation by a new interest—is to be translated offhand into terms of better and worse. Does it necessarily imply decadence, for example, if a custom be dropped by religion and taken up by art? Surely a wise man will say that it depends on the kind of religion and the kind of art involved. Thus it is, to say the least, a moot point whether an amulet is degraded or advanced by being reinterpreted as a trinket. There is, however, one way in which the scientific historian can roughly estimate the comparative value of the interests that are constitutive of a given state of culture. He can class them as life-preserving or merely life-adorning, in so far as they do or do not appear to have a practical and utilitarian bearing on the struggle for existence. On the one hand, government and law, cult and morals, war and commerce, the useful arts and sciences are, plainly, so many nerve-centres of the social organization. On the other hand, what of the speculative sciences