Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/113

 Rh condition of evolution in which they are ordinarily formed. In reality, myths are still formed, without doubt; but these are, with reference to the average conditions of culture in modern nations, real exceptions. Myths, in my opinion, are after all nothing more than a result of the predominance of fancy over the other and higher mental faculties. The mythical force, which augments and revives in epochs of great disasters and calamities, perchance through the complex phenomenon of atavism, is much stronger in uncultured men than in civilized. The myth-creating powers of Charles Darwin would be nil, or almost nil, in comparison with that of the monks of the Middle Ages, and with that of the labourers and rustics of Dorsetshire.

In this sense I think that Mr. Nutt, in defining folk-lore as the anthropology which treats of primitive man, cannot with strictness exaggerate the distance between this science and comparative mythology, since myths, and the elements to which, when combined with them, they owe their origin, are peculiar to a primitive age in which only a very small number of ideas and a vast number of fancies alone have free play.

Nor do I understand the reason why Mr. Nutt excludes biology absolutely from the region of folk-lore; for whether spirit and body are considered as things essentially different, or whether as distinct phases of the same thing, the result can never be that biological phenomena are equal in men and animals, and the psychological phenomena, on the contrary, different. Even admitting the duality of spirit and body, if there exists a physical evolution it seems natural that there must exist also a psychological evolution parallel and corresponding with that. The arguments of Mr. Nutt do not, therefore, bring conviction to me as to the absolute exclusion of biological phenomena from the study of folk-lore. Nay, more, in the course of my reflections on folk-lore I have been led sometimes to consider that there is in it, in a certain measure, a psychological-biology; and that we can observe in it, better than in any other science, the march and the development of the human intellect through past centuries and ages.

Folk-lore also, as far as it relates to the study of usages, customs, ceremonies, festivals and rights, and in general to all those acts of our