Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/119

 Rh from mouth to mouth to future generations; and the actions of its life, regulated, governed, and ruled by these ideas, contributes also to the perpetuating of them in manner, customs, and institutions. But as the spur of new necessities excites new forms of knowledge, which result in disengaging, to a certain degree, manners and customs from the significance which they formerly possessed, sometimes these customs, at other times the dogmas on which they wei-e founded, become completely disintegrated, and remain as empty formulae, mere childish rhymes, fossils, and a word of remote ages. In this sense the people is a true reliquary, a quarry, a conglomerate of the remains of lost habits of thoughts and customs, a real museum of antiquities, whose value and price is entirely unknown to the possessor. The people comes to be a kind of most wealthy but ignorant nobleman, who keeps in his garret a multitude of jewels of the worth of which he is entirely ignorant. And in the people there goes on the formation, so to say, of a stratum of thought completely inconscient, a species of furniture useless to it, and which retards and renders difficult its journey on the road of civilisation and of progress.

But if from this point of view the people preserves in store a series of ancient ideas, which united form the materials for study of a science which might be called palæo-ideology or palæontological-psychology, the people, as a mass of men endowed with reason, and although indifferentiated when viewed as a mass, yet distinct when seen with the microscope of science, has still a progressive element, by means of which it continues to receive from nature a multitude of acquirements which it can only learn in the struggles to which the very necessities of life call it. That every kind of life does minister a series of fixed acquirements is a thing so obvious that we have only to fix our thought, for example, on a group of men who live by fishing or by the chase, to understand the different education to which their forced apprenticeship obliges them. Since human knowledge appears to be