Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 4 1886.djvu/213

 THE SCIENCE OF FOLK-LORE. 205

come to an end that the particular tale, which went to prove beyond doubt in the mind of our Comparative Mythologist that Kasalu was a solar myth, are by no means confined to that hero, but are the general property of the heroes of India, told of this one or that as occasion arises. They are, moreover, as regards Rasalu himself, to a great extent only one local version out of many of his story. If this West- minster reviewer did not jump to his conclusions, I should like to know what to say of his method of reasoning ? In forming a judg- ment on such views as he expresses we should not allow any display of learning to dazzle us into concurrence. Doubtless the outside scientific public does not do so. Erudition is knowledge culled from literature, and is not science, which is knowledge derived from the proper investigation of facts ; and so the most learned of disquisitions may not be in the least degree scientific. That the works of the philological school of Comparative Mythologists are learned enough there is no doubt, but to call Comparative Mythology, as they under- stand it, a science, is, I submit, to use a misnomer. Much of their method is indeed empiricism in excelsis. The Science of Folk-lore should include Comparative Mythology, but I would warn the members of this Society, that if the notion gets abroad that they are mere dilettanti^ from whose labours nothing solid is to be expected, it will take a long while to eradicate it ; and that if they once allow — as have the Comparative Mythologists — the scientific world to consider their methods haphazard, they will bring upon their works a contempt which will not be altogether undeserved.

It will have been observed by students that the Comparative Myth- ologists have held the peasantry of all ages to be endowed with very fine powers of imagination. Now this seems to me to be a mistake, and the truth to be that the rustic imaginative faculty is, and has always been, but moderately developed. Physiologists teach us that the action of a man's brain is governed by physical laws, over which he has really no control, and that his powers are limited in all direc- tions. Now I put it as a proposition worth examining, that the limits of human imagination are conterminous with the hounds of human experience. Of poetic afflatus the ordinary story-teller has only a small share. A mediaeval version of the story of Tristram and the