Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 3 1885.djvu/127

 Rh them in her own way. The institutions of primitive man, from which sociology starts, are as much within the domain of folk-lore as his myths. Indeed the myths and legends of a people are frequently inexplicable apart from its laws and ceremonies. But sociology has mainly to do with history; it may be said to be a forward-looking, while folk-lore is a backward-looking, science. Sociology deals with the social environment and organisation of men, tracing these from their early forms along the lines of their development, and striving from every indication to divine the future of our species. Folk-lore seeks to follow thought back to its fountain, and inquires whence it flows, what are its boundaries, and what are its constituents. Its relations with history are therefore chiefly indirect: it is occupied with materials the historian rejects. Treating of tradition, it has as little to do with art and literature as with history. Traditions become embedded in art and literature as often as in history, or rather they are seized upon by art and literature and made everlasting monuments of beauty. And it is frequently necessary for the student of folk-lore to examine these monuments: they contain for him instructive lessons. But it is not as art and literature that he cares for them; it is because they embalm the relics of an older world,—relics dead in them, but not seldom vital and powerful in contemporary savages, or decaying, though yet alive, among the peasantry and other less advanced classes of his own fellow-countrymen. To correlate all these is the endeavour of folk-lore, and thence to formulate the ideas that swayed mankind in the dark ages of prehistoric antiquity as far back as human beings have existed on the globe. Starting from the assumption that human nature is everywhere the same, it believes that everywhere, though under different forms, the thoughts of humanity are substantially the same; and by the study of the more primitive modes in which they have been expressed our science seeks to recover their original types and the laws of their divergence, and thence to demonstrate from new materials the constitution of the mind. No doubt it is still a long way from the accomplishment of this task; but then it is one of the youngest of the sciences. Rome was not built in a day, and it is small wonder if we have scarcely now begun to find our proper methods or to realise T^hither we are bound,