Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/120

 112 after all nothing more than the appropriation, the assimilation, and the interpretation of the phenomena which surround us, it is clear that distinct forms of knowledge, sentiments, and ideas, correspond to different media, and that these cannot really be substituted the one for the other. Hence arises the diversification of that mass which we call the people, within each nature or state, and even the relatively greater or less development which this mass can attain to or really possess in each country.

Having stated that which I understand to be the people, and that its knowledge, like that of the sciences, deals with all kinds of subjects, I venture to formulate, without any pretension to exactitude, a definition of folk-lore. This is, in my idea, the science which has for its object the study of indifferentiated or anonymous humanity, from an epoch which may he considered as its infancy down to our own day.

Without being able to specify precisely the moment at which this age may be said really to begin, we believe it to be posterior to the primitive age, because it pre-supposes the formation of the two great groups alluded to; one in appearance indifferentiated, and the other full of appreciable distinctions within itself. But if the study of folklore has its starting-point in this age, the vestiges of which remain not only in the people but in all classes—just as vestiges of childhood remain during the whole life, both in the adult and in the old man — the study of folk-lore should include that of the people during the whole of its life as well in the actual exercise of its mental faculties, and in its practices and customs of to-day, as in the evidences which it preserves, by its customs and by oral tradition, of its anterior exercise of them, and of its past life.

The age, properly called primitive, falls, in our judgment, within the sphere of ethnology, of prehistoric times, and of anthropology. The hatchet, the dagger, or the arrow of primitive man, and his physical constitution, as it may be studied in his skeletons and skulls, do not form the subject-matter of folk-lore, nor do the acts and conceptions of the child belong to it either.

The study of the psychology of the infant, in fact, and the study of that of savage races, can serve only as a medium for analogy, and to control the study of demo-psychology; they have in themselves