Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/74

 50 seems to me questionable in the extreme; a standard of Aryan belief, practice, and fancy is set up, and what conflicts with or departs widely from that standard is assumed to be pre-Aryan. I dispute the existence of such a standard common to the Aryan-speaking world at any known period of its history, and even could it be established I should still dispute the necessity of referring an item of belief or fancy that conflicted with it to the influence of a different race. To talk, for instance, of the pre-Aryan matriarchalism of the Picts, of the pre-Aryan druidism of the Gael, is to confound hypothesis of a highly questionable nature with fact. It is very probable that the Celts found non-Aryan-speaking peoples in these islands, though after all the fact is not absolutely certain. It is highly probable that these peoples possessed both a folk-philosophy and a folk-literature, fragments of which have possibly, very probably, survived. But how are we to distinguish them? Is it really likely that the philosophy differed so markedly from that of the Celts that we can detect traces of it after 2,500 years? whilst of the literature, if aught has survived, it must by the necessities of the case have passed through the minds of Celtic bards and story-tellers. The Celtic record, sociological and literary, teems with examples of the enigmatic, the savagely archaic, the apparently misinterpreted. It greatly simplifies matters if in each case we can invoke the pre-Aryan hypothesis, but does our present knowledge of Celtic and Aryan antiquity justify our doing so? I do not think so.

I here touch upon what I ought perhaps to have started with, the significance of the term "race." Outside the record of history, of literature (oral or written), of art, of systematised thought, it is for me, in the present connection, void of meaning. When I speak of the Celtic or Teutonic race I have in view a community which for a definite number of centuries has manifested itself in clearly defined products of the mind, has set upon the universal human material of