Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/126

 118 every other principle, may, in truth, be of comparatively modern introduction, the product merely of the present state of society, or of institutions or speculations of no very remote period. Without, therefore, undervaluing the method, or disputing the results, of the introspective inquirer, folk-lore seems to me to set before itself the investigation of the external phenomena. Dealing with thought in its primitive forms, it traces it downwards from the higher civilisation* where it is exhibited in the conscious logic and historical religions, institutions, arts, science, and literature of the progressive races, to its earliest and lowest manifestation in the forefathers, not only of the Indo-European, but also of the Semitic and Turanian tribes and in the barbarous and savage races of to-day. Although it cannot afford altogether to neglect any period of culture, or any subject on which the mind of man has been exercised, it passes by almost all that we are accustomed to regard as the characteristic products of civilisation. Its business is with mankind in its infancy and childhood, when the untrained imagination was dominant, and knowledge was purely empirical,—when men could only make futile guesses at the facts of their own natures and of the world about them, and when the organisation of society was as yet more or less rudimentary. Its object is, as M. Gaidoz says in the February number of Mélusine, "reconstituer la genèse des croyances et des usages." Traces of that which has gone before naturally remain: "the child is father of the man" is true not only of the individual but also of the race. The student of folklore looks for these traces as naturalists studying the evolution of physical organisms look for indications of prior stages through which the species and genera, the families and classes, of the animal or vegetable kingdom have been developed. It would hardly seem accurate to define biology as a science of survivals, yet it would be as accurate to do so as to define folk-lore in such terms. The one is just as much and as little a science of survivals as the other. Both have to do with survivals, but both reason beyond them.

Civilisation has grown out of savagery; and because the phenomena of thought for which we seek are those of uncivilised men they live in Tradition. They elude the grasp of the historian; and, although social science finds in some of them a portion of her material, she treats