Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/23

Rh at any previous period in the history of our science, there is the danger that it may be impossible to give to the world the fruit of the work to which so much energy is being devoted. Our Society can fulfil no more useful function than that of assisting the diffusion of this knowledge, but this will only be possible if we can greatly increase the proportion of our funds devoted to publication.

In the choice of a subject for the customary Presidential Address it seems natural that one who has come to the study of folk-lore from psychology should deal with the relation between these two subjects, a relation already brought prominently before us during the last year by the two important papers published in our Journal by Mr. Bartlett. Two chief possibilities presented themselves when I decided to take this course. I could deal with the general relation of recent psychological developments to folk-lore, or I could take up some special problem, interesting to folk-lorists and ethnologists, to the solution of which psychology can contribute.

Of these two alternatives I have chosen the latter, and propose to consider how psychology can contribute to the solution of a problem which confronts the student of any form of human culture, but particularly when he turns to those lowly societies found in parts of the earth now being so greatly affected by the spread of our modern civilisation. The problem to which I refer is that presented by the combination of conservatism and plasticity; by the combination of an intense clinging to old customs and beliefs side by side with a readiness to accept new ideas and new customs founded upon those ideas.

I must begin by justifying the statement that men, and especially those varieties of mankind we call savage or barbarous, are at the same time conservative and plastic.

I do not propose to deal at any length with man's conservatism. The volumes of the journal of our Society form a long record of the persistence of customs and beliefs