Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 5, 1894.djvu/52

 44 missionary, "One event is always the son of another, and we must never forget the parentage."

I, myself, do not believe that even the imaginative faculty of the human brain is capable of absolutely "inventing" anything. It may alter the conception of things already in existence, add together incongruous elements, and produce results which are marvellous or supernatural, according to the frame of mind in which we look at them. It may produce many incongruous equations—such, for instance, as human body + bird's wings = angels; it may create a hell out of its own gloomy and dismal fears, and a heaven out of the delights of life. But it is one of the satisfactions of scientific inquiry into human thought that the mind is not capable of absolutely freeing itself from the region of fact. It reaches back into the past by the effort of memory, tradition, and record; it reaches forward into the future by the sublime function of hope. But as what it sees in the past cannot be its own creation, independent of fact, so what it foresees in the future cannot be independent of fact; that is, the function of hope being granted, it must take its rise from some fact with which it is correlated—a fact of which we may know little or next to nothing, but which does not cease to be a fact because of our ignorance. Always, therefore, as it seems to me, there is a reality at the bottom of all fancy and all tradition. It is difficult always to find this reality. For instance, there is the story of "A man who once had a melon, and as he was cutting it, he let his knife fall into it, whereupon he took his garden ladder and went down into the melon to look for his knife. And in the melon he met a man, who asked him what he was seeking. 'What!' said he, 'are you only looking for a knife? Why, I have lost sixteen spoons in this horrid place, and have been trying high and low to find them for a month past!'" (Ossete Tale, Haxthausen, Transcaucasia, 421). What fact this can have come from I confess I am not prepared to suggest; all I say is that it is not the result of an